Heath Stewart

Principal 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.

Post by this author

Redirect the Package Cache using registry-based policy

June 9th, 2015
Visual Studio can require a lot of space on the system drive, and previous methods of redirecting the Package Cache can be tricky for some people to set up or even maintain as junctions across volumes may be removed on boot. The cache is there for good reasons and has significantly reduced the failure rate, but for people with smaller system ...

Visual Studio 2013 continuously repairs producing many small log files

April 20th, 2015
If you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Professional, Premium, or Ultimate editions installed and are finding many small MSI*.log files in your %TEMP% directory, you may find you are running low on disk space because of how many of these files are created. While they may only be about 3MB, what causes these files to be produced can do so ...

Detection keys for Visual Studio 2015

April 13th, 2015
Administrators and developers who need to detect whether Visual Studio 2015 is installed can use similar registry keys as with past releases. This time around, though, we’ve made some changes to the lineup of products but the registry scheme remains the same. Most of the detection keys are found in the 32-bit registry hive – the ones you...

Workaround for when Visual Studio Update says it doesn’t apply

September 12th, 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 ...

Workaround for when Visual Studio Update says it doesn’t apply

September 12th, 2014
(image) 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...

How to register your program for file extensions shared with other programs

August 21st, 2014
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 ...

Visual Studio 2010 uninstall utility back online

August 20th, 2014
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...

Seeing colors with psake

June 28th, 2014
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...

Update does not apply or is blocked by another condition on your computer

May 23rd, 2014
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 ...

Incorrect hash value when installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

May 1st, 2014
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. (image) Problem When installing VS2013 Update 2 you see the error or warning message, “The hash value is not correct.” This will ...