Visual Studio Setup
Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
Latest posts
Installing Visual Studio 2010 RTM and Service Pack 1 together
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 before proceeding with the following instructions, particularly how to avoid restarts during setup by pre-installing certain packages like Windows Installer 4.5 and .NET Framework 4.0. How to: Create and run an unattended Visual Studio with SP1 setup You’ll create a distr...
Installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 may prompt for source
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 Installer. This includes, but is not limited to, the following MSI files. I will update this list of files customers are commonly seeing as I’m made aware. If you are seeing this with other MSI files when installing VS2010 SP1, please comment below. How to wor...
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 has shipped
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. And while we hope you’ll notice a better development experience with SP1 installed, should you ever need to uninstall it we now provide a single method to do so. In Add/Remove Programs, you can select Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 and cl...
Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 installing for over 2 hours could be a sign of a problem
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 of the issueIf Visual Studio 2010 SP1 is taking more than a couple of hours to install, it may be stuck in a loop waiting for the user to cancel the current operation. To determine if this is the case, If you find that text in the temporary log file, pl...
A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product
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 install the patch.Several copies of the patch may be createdWhen you install a Windows Installer package, many copies of either the MSI or MSP package are created. But even before you start an installation, a bootstrap application will often download or copy the package locall...
Providing feedback on Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta installation
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 installation experience – especially if you’re running into installation problems.But before we can really help identify an installation issues and help you work around it – not to mention possible solutions for RTM – we need installation logs for the ...
Announcing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 Beta
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 changes to the product in Jason’s blog post.This release also marks a change in the deployment experience to provide customers a single download to update any products already installed on their systems. While VS2010 SP1 Beta is available for ENU and JPN customers, SP1 RTM w...
Delete shadow copies to compact VHDs and AVHDs
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 when booting to different AVHDs.But a couple of weeks ago I accidentally created a new source enlistment on my guest system drive – a series of differencing disks on top of a dynamic root disk (VHD). Not only did this expand to the limit of the virtual drive capacity, but...
Restart Manager functionality in WiX 3.5
WiX 3.5 provides features to integrate with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010. But like many add-ins, since new files are being added they certainly can’t be in use by devenv.exe. So when we call devenv.exe /setup as part of our install, the changes may not show up in running instances of Visual Studio. To provide a better experience – and because this seems to be a fairly common request – I’ve added a custom action in WiX 3.5’s WixUtilExtension to use the Restart Manager in Vista and newer. The Restart Manager is capable of shutting down applications – similar to the normal files-in-use functionality in Window...