Visual Studio Setup

Restart Manager functionality in WiX 3.5

September 16, 2010 Sep 16, 2010 09/16/10

Heath Stewart

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 – ...

Downgrading Shared Components

September 8, 2010 Sep 8, 2010 09/8/10

Heath Stewart

Shared components define shared resources. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to understand that whatever you do to a shared resource during the installation of one product affects those same resources for any other product. For example, when upgrading one product to update files shared with another product, that other product ...

Comparison of PatchWiz and WiX v3 Patch Build

August 24, 2010 Aug 24, 2010 08/24/10

Heath Stewart

The Windows Installer SDK ships a library named patchwiz.dll. This contains the logic to build a patch from pairs of database packages (.msi files, or simply MSIs) along with other configuration properties. Another tool that the SDK ships is msimsp.exe which uses patchwiz.dll and parses command line options. These tools consume an input file ...

Visual Studio 2010 Uninstall Utility

August 23, 2010 Aug 23, 2010 08/23/10

Heath Stewart

While we hope you’ll love Visual Studio 2010 for all the application development it enables with powerful features and a robust extension model that enables great extensions like the Productivity Power Tools, if you ever need to uninstall Visual Studio it can be difficult. If you’ve ever tried to remove Visual Studio you already ...

Customizing Shortcuts for Visual Studio

August 21, 2010 Aug 21, 2010 08/21/10

Heath Stewart

After installing the last several releases of Visual Studio, you’ll find shortcuts to command prompts that automatically set up the PATH, INCLUDE, LIB, and other environment variables. At least with Visual Studio 2010 these command prompts have larger buffers and enable quick edit mode, but some people like to customize these shortcuts ...

Detection keys for .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010

May 4, 2010 May 4, 2010 05/4/10

Heath Stewart

Now that Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 have been released, developers may wonder how to detect them on the system. As with previous releases, we support registry detection of either product family and Windows Installer component detection for Visual Studio. Detecting either product uses a separate set of supported keys. ....

Major Upgrades with Shared Components

April 9, 2010 Apr 9, 2010 04/9/10

Heath Stewart

Major upgrades are Windows Installer products that can be installed like any other product with the added benefit of removing one ore more related products. For example, version 2 of a product can be installed on a clean machine, or on a machine with version 1 already installed and will remove version 1.When another version of a product is ...

Testing for components that install under TARGETDIR

February 26, 2010 Feb 26, 2010 02/26/10

Heath Stewart

A while back I explained how Windows Installer sets the TARGETDIR property to the root of the fixed drive with the most free space available. The problem is that even an attached USB external drive can appear as a fixed drive, and these may be later detached. If components are installed to that drive and the drive is detached, repairing, ...

Test your conditions

February 15, 2010 Feb 15, 2010 02/15/10

Heath Stewart

When testing the serviceability of your product before you ship, it’s important to test any conditions you might have on the product, features, components, and actions.Feature conditions can set the install level of a feature when the package is installed. But as the Condition table documentation states, be sure that the condition does ...

Serviceability

February 14, 2010 Feb 14, 2010 02/14/10

Heath Stewart

It’s always important to test your product before it ships. Servicing it later can prove very costly and very difficult. It’s no different with your installation packages. You need to test not only basic install and uninstall operations, but also test your servicing plan. Problems are inevitable in practically any application, and ...