Visual Studio Setup
Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
Latest posts
Failure when upgrading from VS2015 RTM to VS2015 with Update 1
If you have Visual Studio 2015 RTM installed and attempt to install Visual Studio 2015 with Update 1, you may see a failure like the screenshot that reads, KB3022398 This action is only valid for products that are currently installed. This is a fatal error that occurs when upgrading from VS 2015 RTM to the VS 2015 slipstream release. The slipsteram is RTM + VSU1 merged together for a faster install – especially for new customers wnated to install the latest VS2015. Solution If you encounter this error, you need only repair the product and setup will continue normally. Descrip...
Removing Visual Studio components left behind after an uninstall
When you install Visual Studio and related content like Windows Kits or some add-ons, most packages that comprise those bundles are reference counted to make sure they are not removed prematurely. Uninstalling Visual Studio and related content should eventually remove those packages (i.e. last one out the door turns off the light). Contrast with older releases where almost everything was left installed because we couldn’t be sure which other products still required them.Some packages, however, do get left behind. Some are packages that do not participate in package ref-counting – often those that we d...
How to install Visual Studio to another directory when a pre-release is installed
If you’ve installed pre-release versions of Visual Studio – or even another edition of the same release – you may find you can’t change the installation target directory. This is because once a set of shared components is installed, we install all the other components to the same directory structure. When you have multiple editions installed, this save disk space since shared files occupy the same location on disk – not to mention results in faster install times since Windows Installer doesn’t copy the same bits again. And while we do support build-to-build upgrades, those shar...
Redirect the Package Cache using registry-based policy
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 drives or partitions it can be a barrier. Deleting the cache directory in its entirety can also lead to problems. So a design change was made to the WiX setup chainer, Burn, to support setting a registry-based policy to redirect the cache to another partition. This registry ...
Visual Studio 2013 continuously repairs producing many small log files
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 often enough that it may not take long to fill up the drive where %TEMP% resides. Workaround We are consistently seeing this issue caused by a missing directory, C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\URTInstall_GAC (or %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\URTInstall_GAC). To work ...
Detection keys for Visual Studio 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’ll typically want to detect, anyway. Following is a table of the products we’ve announced. The biggest change to the detection keys is that Enterprise replaces Premium and Ultimate. Community is also a subset of Professional which is a subset of Enterprise, so if you yo...
Workaround for when Visual Studio Update says it doesn’t apply
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 applicable Visual Studio installed. From the logs alone, however, we were unable to determine the root cause and certainly never ran into it during countless tests across not only the division but dogfooding across the company…until recently. One cause of this problem is when...
Workaround for when Visual Studio Update says it doesn’t apply
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 applicable Visual Studio installed. From the logs alone, however, we were unable to determine the root cause and certainly never ran into it during countless tests across not only the division but dogfooding across the company…until recently. One cause of this problem is when the...
How to register your program for file extensions shared with other programs
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 associations in general, your file can only be associated with one program. That is, double-clicking on the file can only open one program unless some other intermediate system decides otherwise. Windows Vista introduced such a system. The Default Programs feature - which includes ...