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

Visual Studio 2012 RTM will not install on pre-release versions of Windows 8

August 23rd, 2012
SymptomCustomers installing Visual Studio 2012 RTM on pre-release versions of Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 may see the following error after launching the setup application: The .Net Framework installed on this machine does not meet the minimum required version: 4.5.50709. This is a blocking error and only allows the install to be canceled...

Visual Studio 2012 can only install to certified Windows To Go drives

August 22nd, 2012
Windows To Go is a cool new enterprise features to enable a mobile workforce to carry around an enterprise-managed installation of Windows on a USB thumb drive. However, only certified thumb drives appear as fixed drives and, therefore, Visual Studio 2012 can only install to certified drives. VS2012, like some other products, only supports ...

A certificate chain could not be built to a trusted root authority

August 17th, 2012
This was a preview of a Knowledge Base article which has been published as KB2746268.SymptomAfter Visual Studio 2012 has been installed, the finish page displays the following: Setup Completed However, not all features installed correctly. Please correct the following problems to ensure full product functionality. Click here to see the most ...

Upgrading from Visual Studio 2012 RC to RTM

August 17th, 2012
Now that Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 have been released, some customers are wondering if they need to uninstall the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate (RC) first before upgraded. In general, the answer is “no”. VS2012 RC will upgrade to RTM, but there are a few things to note: For more information about ...

Detection keys for Visual Studio 2012

August 3rd, 2012
Administrators and developers who need to detect if Visual Studio 2012 is installed on a machine can use similar keys as those used for past releases like Visual Studio 2010. In general, these detection keys are always found in the 32-bit registry hive with a pattern like: So if you needed to detect if VS2012 Ultimate is installed, you ...

How Visual Studio 2012 Avoids Prompts for Source

July 26th, 2012
Requiring source packages during installation, repairs, and even uninstall are common occurrences for some customers. The core issue is that Windows Installer needs the source location of the package and its files to install - and can't find them automatically - when attempting to restore the machine to the state it should be in (according to ...

Easier Authoring for Slipstreaming Patches

July 26th, 2012
Slipstreaming Windows Installer patches is, technically, installing the MSP simultaneously with the MSI as a single transaction. This is, effectively: The applicable transforms (both the authoring changes and patch transforms) are applied to the MSI and the MSI is installed with those changes from the start. Both the MSI and MSP are cached ...

New Revision of the July 2012 Update for Visual Studio 2012 RC

July 13th, 2012
We have released a new revision of the July 2012 Update for VS2012 RC. This update replaces – or supersedes – the previous update, which means the download link is the same. We have retained the previous packages that VSUpdate installs – or chains – to support customers who may still require source packages when ...

July 2012 Update for Visual Studio 2012 RC

July 6th, 2012
A few months ago we introduced a new method of delivering updates to Visual Studio 2012. Today we published updates in the same manner for Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidates.You can download the July 2012 update (KB2703187) for VS2012 RC from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=257044. More information about this update is available at ...

How to fix “Invalid License Data” after upgrading from Visual Studio 2012 Beta to RC

June 4th, 2012
(image) A few customers have reported the following error after upgrading from VS2012 Beta to the Release Candidate (RC): Invalid License Data Reinstall is required. Aaron Marten on the Visual Studio Extensibility team has a post describing how to fix this issue. This should only happen if you upgrade a “higher” Beta edition to a...