Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

How to Download all of Visual Studio 2008 SP1

May 14, 2008 May 14, 2008 05/14/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Changes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

May 12, 2008 May 12, 2008 05/12/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Visual Studio and .NET Log Collection Utility

May 10, 2008 May 10, 2008 05/10/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...

MSIZap is not Uninstall

April 22, 2008 Apr 22, 2008 04/22/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Functional Testing of Cmdlets

April 7, 2008 Apr 7, 2008 04/7/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Windows Installer 4.5 Beta 2 Available

April 1, 2008 Apr 1, 2008 04/1/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Group by Different Properties for Format-Table

March 15, 2008 Mar 15, 2008 03/15/08
Heath Stewart
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 ...