Heath Stewart

Senior Software Engineer, Azure SDK

Heath is an application architect and developer, looking to help educate others to learn professional development. Besides designing and developing applications he enjoys writing about intermediate and advanced topics. Heath also consults for deployment packages and scenarios within Microsoft and for external customers.

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More Photos from Mt. Rainier

August 17th, 2005
Jens Häupel, a developer evangelist for Microsoft Germany, recently attended (English translation) a Tech Conference here in Seattle and had a chance to visit and take photographs — very nice photographs — at Mt. Rainier. The views around Microsoft really are very beautiful.On that note, the Developer Division Customer Product...

A Reason for ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT

August 16th, 2005
Last week I blogged about how is dangerous, but there are reasons for using it. Two reasons is defined in the product MSIs for the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 is to localize the Add/Remove Programs (ARP) entries, and to change certain registry values so that the external UI handler is invoked to handle the requested operation....

Deploying Crystal Reports with your Managed Application

August 16th, 2005
A common problem I see in various developer forums is trying to build an installation package with the Crystal Reports merge modules or running an application with Crystal Reports on another machine is that the registration code is often forgotten. You may see an error like the following on another machine where Crystal Reports has not been ...

My One-year Anniversary

August 16th, 2005
Today is my one-year anniversary here at Microsoft and I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of great people and on great projects. I've seen two betas of the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 and a myriad of Community Technology Previews (CTPs) go out the door, improved some of the patching technology for older ...

Detecting repair, patch install, and patch uninstall for Windows Installer

August 12th, 2005
A frequently asked question is how to detect whether a product installed using Windows Installer is being repaired, or a patch is being installed or — starting with Windows Installer 3.0 — uninstalled. The answer is detecting which properties are set.When a product — or even a single feature or multiple features — is ...

The Dangers of ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT

August 5th, 2005
Back in March I wrote about the dangers of using the and registry keys. This is another post to help you avoid some other pitfalls.The property in Windows Installer does not actually do anything directly to your installation — Windows Installer doesn't even check for it. What does happen, however, is that the Add/Remove Programs (ARP...

Compact Your VHD Files

July 31st, 2005
Many times it's necessary to debug solutions on other machines so that you don't corrupt your developer machine, because of different platform requirements, or to attach a debugger without changing the state of the machine. Testing Windows Installer patches is no different. We test on daily target builds using daily upgrade builds. Installing ...

Answers to Windows Installer Issues

July 25th, 2005
A few weeks ago the Windows Installer team started blogging. Over the course of last week Robert Flaming — now a PM for the Windows Installer team — posted a number of helpful troubleshooting tips that are generated in part from an internal discussion alias. Most teams within Microsoft use Windows Installer so the internal ...

Deciphering an HRESULT

July 21st, 2005
Aaron Stebner recently blogged about ways to find out the cause of 1935 Windows Installer errors and I wanted to provide a little more background on what an defines. An in the 32-bit world and beyond is defined as a , or a signed 32-bit integer. It is defined in, among other places, winerror.h in the Platform SDK. It defines the severity of ...

The View near Microsoft

July 20th, 2005
(image) Working for Microsoft has been a dream since I was very young and now that I'm finally here I love this company even more. I believe in what we're doing and in the ways we help people. I think it's great we have such an energetic CEO, and I love Microsoft's commitment in improving our products and listening and working more with our ...