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.

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Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1

April 1st, 2011
After installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, some users were unable to use the x64 or IA64 compilers from the Windows SDK 7.1. Now the Visual C++ team has released an update for VS2010 SP1 available here. For more information about the update, please see KB2519277 on the Microsoft Support site.You can install the update to fix existing ...

Verify the ISO checksum for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 before installing

March 25th, 2011
While we recommend installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 using the web download – which only downloads and install those packages needed on your machine – you can also download an ISO for offline use. If you downloaded the ISO for VS2010 SP1 from the Microsoft Download Center or from MSDN Subscriber Downloads, please verify the ...

Installing Visual Studio 2010 RTM and Service Pack 1 together

March 15th, 2011
Now that Visual Studio 2010 SP1 has been released, administrators and developers may wish to install both RTM and SP1 together for a seamless experience. With the release of VS2010 RTM we already published the Visual Studio Administrator Guide that documents a lot of the instructions I’ll utilize below. I encourage you to review that ...

Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 may prompt for source

March 14th, 2011
Some users are reporting that when installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 they are prompted for MSI files as shown in the following example screenshot. These prompts for source are most common during rollback on failed install attempts and uninstall since original RTM files need to be put back on the machine and may not have been cached by Windows ...

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 has shipped

March 8th, 2011
As announced in Soma’s blog post, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 has been released to MSDN subscribers today and will release to the general public on Thursday, March 10th.We have made a number of significant changes in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from past releases we hope will make deployment smoother for both developers and administrators alike...

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem

March 2nd, 2011
On average customers are experience ~45 minute installs for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Based on machine performance, even seeing install times of a little over an hour isn’t unexpected. But if VS2010 SP1 is taking more than a couple hours to install, there could be a problem and in the case described below requires user action.Description ...

A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product

February 20th, 2011
Often I’m asked why installing a Windows Installer patch (MSP) takes as long or longer to install than the target product (MSI). While this isn’t always the case for every patch, it’s certainly possible for a number of reasons. It may also come as a surprise that the size of the patch can have little to do with the time to ...

Providing feedback on Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta installation

December 8th, 2010
By installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta now (or tomorrow for general availability), you have a great opportunity to provide early feedback before we ship VS2010 SP1 RTM. Not only do we welcome feedback on the updates to the product such as the new Help Viewer, performance regressions, and more; but we also want to hear your feedback on the ...

Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta

December 7th, 2010
If you haven’t seen from Soma’s or Jason’s blog, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is available today for MSDN Subscribers and will be available on Thursday for the general public. This service pack contains a lot of performance improvements and a new Help Viewer based on strong customer feedback. You can find out about more ...

Delete shadow copies to compact VHDs and AVHDs

December 7th, 2010
For a few years my primary development machine has actually been a VM with source located on a physical hard drive attached to the VM. This helps reduce latency compared to a differencing disk (AVHD) which may need to expand to accommodate additional data (common when building). It’s also easier to maintain than multiple boot entries ...