Visual Studio Setup
Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
Latest posts
Why Visual Studio 11 Requires Space on the System Drive
Users have asked why space is required on the system drive (typically the C: drive) when they choose to install Visual Studio 11 to another drive.While Visual Studio 11 does allow you to install the majority of features to another drive, VS11 still requires space on the system drive for the following reasons: For Visual Studio 11 Ultimate Beta, about 45% of the entire installation is located on the other drive. We are working to improve that experience but significant drive space will still be required on the system drive for those reasons above.If you have significant disk space available, I recom...
Packaging Caching in Burn
There are times when repairing or servicing a product that source media is required. As more product installs move to web-based installs, these prompts for source are harder to solve. In order to replace missing, corrupted, or older files, the source is required because those files have to come from somewhere.Burn, the bootstrapper application in the Windows Installer XML toolset, aims to solve that by caching setup packages on disk – specifically in %ProgramData% or %LocalAppData% depending on whether a package is installed per-machine or per-user, respectively. Whenever a user repairs a bundle, the cached...
Announcing Visual Studio 11 Beta
Along with the release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, we have released Visual Studio 11 Beta and Jason Zander has announced many of the great new and improved features in VS11 Beta. We have also introduced a new setup experience with VS11. Setup is built atop Burn, the Windows Installer XML engine, as well as the managed bootstrapper application (MBA) interoperability layer. This means that setup supports many of the features of Burn including package ref-counting, creating layouts for later installs, and build to build upgrades. We will highlight these features of setup more in our team blog. If anyone ...
Introducing Sticky Patching and Add-ons
Late last week I checked in a feature for Windows Installer XML’s (WiX) chainer, Burn, that I’m really excited about (ask my colleagues): sticky patching.This is a feature at the bundle (what we call our composition of packages for Burn) level that supports related bundles of type “Patch” and “Addon”. Whenever you install a new bundle, if there are any of those related bundles already on the machine, they are automatically re-installed (efficiently) at the end of the chain (the sequence of packages in the bundle).“Patch” and “Addon” related bundles will ...
Introducing Package Reference Counting
These days it’s more common to install products composed of more than one installer package. Modern applications are often a loose fitting of localized components and being authored into a single package just isn’t practical.For example, a localized application will undoubtedly have neutral or single-language binaries while using satellite resources for other languages’ resources. You could package these common binaries into separate fully-localized installer packages – one for each language – but that will lead to all sorts of problems with shared components.Having separate packages...
Introducing Managed Bootstrapper Applications
Now that WiX v3.6 has been released, I introduce the managed bootstrapper application (MBA) interoperability layer. It’s been available for a while actually, and if you’ve installed any builds of WiX v3.6, or the Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0 Developer Preview you’ve seen it in action. While Burn – the WiX bootstrapper engine – and the core bootstrapper application interfaces are native and allow you to develop completely native bootstrapper applications, MBA allows managed code developers to utilize their skills to develop rich interactive setups. WPF designers can also utilize their skills to make the setup U...
Installing across network may slow Visual Studio 2010 and Service Pack 1 setup
If you are installing Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 from across the network and are experiencing slow install times, this could be caused by low network bandwidth and long verification times.How to work around this issueFor Visual Studio 2010 RTM, copy the entire contents of the network directory locally. This directory contains setup.exe and folders like WCU. After all the files have been copied, run setup.exe as you would normally. When possible, you might also install from an ISO (if burning to DVD, please verify the download and burn results) or a web bootstrapper which should not ex...
Visual C++ 2010 SP1 Compiler Update for the Windows SDK 7.1
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 installations, but if you have not yet installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 the recommended install order is, Please visit the Visual C++ team blog for more information or questions.
Verify the ISO checksum for Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 before installing
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 checksum for the ISO before you install. This can help prevent issues when installing SP1.The checksums follow. To verify the SHA1 hash of the ISO, you can download the File Checksum Integrity Verifier (fciv.exe) described in KB841290. Installing the package will prompt wher...