One of many improvements made to Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is that VS 2008 SP1 Beta customers will not need to uninstall SP1 Beta before installing the release of SP1. The same is true for Visual Studio 2008 Express products and .NET 3.5 SP1 - both of which are complete upgrades to older products that may already be on the system or that ca...

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is comprised of multiple packages, including executables, installer packages, and patches. Compare this with Visual Studio 2005 SP1 which was a single patch wrapped in an executable. A lot of updates were made to both the .NET Framework and VS 2008 - along with changes to SQL and other bits from across the company ...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) has been released to web, along with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta). Included as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 are Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 (Beta) and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 2 (Beta). Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes over 250 new features and improvem...

Setup and deployment is a tricky business. Machines can be in many different and often unforeseen states that cause setup to fail. But rarely will setup actually crash, and that is why setup logs are vital to diagnose install, repair, and uninstall problems. Setup applications for Visual Studio and .NET may write to many different logs because t...

The tool msizap.exe that is available in the Windows SDK and elsewhere on the web (remember to always download from a trusted source) is a powerful but dangerous tool that is often used to quickly and casually, and can leave your machine in a corrupted state if not used correctly. The same is true for the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility which use...

A lot of customers have recently started seeing the following errors, all stating in various ways that Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 failed to install. You may also see this when attempting to install other updates on top of .NET 2.0 SP1. The error you will see depends on how you are applying updates. If you are installing .NET 2.0 SP...

While developing unit and functional tests for Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions, I needed a way to invoke cmdlets without requiring elevation on Vista. That is, of course, because running elevated has always been a bad idea unless it is required. In order to load a PowerShell snap-in, however, one must write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE which requi...

The Windows Installer team released Windows Installer 4.5 Beta 2 recently. While not a lot has visibly changed since the first beta for which I provided an overview, it's important to note that a new column was added to the CustomAction table since changes to column types are not supported in a transform or patch but adding a new column is supporte...

For my Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions, I've been simplifying some of the use cases and adding additional formats. One thing I wanted to do was display source list information in a table and group either by the attached ProductCode or PatchCode properties. The format-table cmdlet doesn't support multiple properties and doesn't appear to all...

While attempting to install Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008, you may get a prompt for source that looks like the following screenshot. This problem commonly occurs if you have not installed one or more of the features Visual Basic, Visual C++, or Visual C# when installing Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008). If you have your VS...