Showing archive results for 2014

I previously blogged about a problem some customers were running into that prevented Visual Studio Update from installing. You might see a dialog like the one to the right and an error message that read something like, Update 2 does not apply, or is blocked by another condition on your computer. At least for many people, they had an applicable Vi...

I previously blogged about a problem some customers were running into that prevented Visual Studio Update from installing. You might see a dialog like the one to the right and an error message that read something like, Update 2 does not apply, or is blocked by another condition on your computer. At least for many people, they had an applicabl...

One frequently asked question is, “how do we register our program for a file extension when other versions (or programs) that handle it might also be installed?” The overarching question is really about how to have non-shared resources both write to a shared resource.  But in the case with the Windows registry and file associations...

Four years ago I published a utility to help perform a clean uninstall of Visual Studio 2010. Before we added package reference counting and related bundles to Visual Studio setup, we couldn’t always be sure which products were still required so not everything was removed. This utility will remove everything provided one of a few command line...

Psake (pronounced like Japanese “sake”) is a build automation tool similar to others out there like make, rake, etc., but built using PowerShell as the language of choice. So it should be no surprise that I use it for my Windows Installer PowerShell Module. It’s useful for automating tasks not limited to just calling MSBuild, but ...

We have investigated reports of some installs of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 reporting that no applicable updates are available even when VS2013 is installed. We have been unable to reproduce the cause in our labs and besides offering a workaround, we would like to ask for your assistance if you can reproduce the problem in the specific scenario de...

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC introduces some cool new features and adds an option to slipstream the install of VS2013 RTM with Update 2 RC, but some attempts to download it have had the following problem. Problem When installing VS2013 Update 2 you see the error or warning message, “The hash value is not correct.” This will show up as either an...

Given many of the exciting announcements and features demonstrated recently at Build 2014, customers are downloading Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC. This update is quite a bit bigger than VS2013 Update 1 since it contains many new features. A small number of customers, however, are experiencing problems installing VS2013.2 RC. Symptoms While spec...

Visual Studio can require a lot of space on the system drive. Based on years of data collected from customers’ installations from the Customer Experience Improvement Program, we took advantage of this feature in Burn – the Windows Installer XML (WiX) chainer – to eliminate most errors during repair, servicing, and even uninstall. This was not a pop...

Our first public release of Visual Studio Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 is available. There are, however, a couple of known issues in hopefully uncommon scenarios. Fixed We have fixed this in future versions of Visual Studio Update. This post is kept for historical reasons should any users have problems upgrading from pre-release versio...