Today I’m pleased to announce that Sara has helped me post a useful tool I wrote to help eliminate confusion to which products a patch applies and which of those products are installed on your system.

There has been quite a bit of confusion because there are a lot of Visual Studio editions, and the Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, is used by other developers as a hosting platform for their add-ins, such as the SQL Server 2005 client. Some users were finding that a patch for Visual Studio reported Windows error 1642, or ERROR_PATCH_TARGET_NOT_FOUND. In many cases only the IDE SKU was only installed, which has the appearance – but far fewer files – than Visual Studio editions from Developer Division.

In response to such confusion, I created the Patch Applicability Browser. You can download and install this tool to not only determine to which products a patch applies, but which of those products are actually installed on your machine. You’ll find that many Visual Studio patches don’t target the IDE SKU, which is installed with the SQL Server 2005 client.

There is no doubt this tool will be handy for diagnosing any issues found with Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1.