Due to a bug in older versions of Visual Studio 2017, you should set the CachePath policy in both 32- and 64-bit views of the registry.
Yesterday I released servicing update 2.2.1, which updates 2.2.0 to fix a few bugs and add a few cool new features: Version-specific documentation has been added, but the most significant change to the documentation is the complete overhaul of the examples. Apart from removing some old examples using deprecated functionality, I organized the...
Installation bootstrap applications are increasingly common as products chain dependencies like the Microsoft .NET Framework. Because 64-bit Windows supports both 32- and 64-bit execution, but 64-bit executables on 32-bit Windows give what some users might consider cryptic error messages, installation developers often ship a 32-bit bootstrap applic...
Windows Installer 4.5 introduced a feature to install multiple packages in a single transaction. Multi-package transactions allow setup developers to install multiple packages as an atomic unit that are installed together, or rolled back completely. You can also apply patches to multiple products or even repair multiple products – any mainten...
After installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, adding or removing features from Visual Studio may prompt for the file SQLSysClrTypes.msi with the following text: Setup is looking for file SQLSysClrTypes.msi. Please insert Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU disk 1 now. The text will read differently depending...
Since plans were made to ship WiX v3 in the box for Visual Studio 2010, the WiX working group has been working on fixing all outstanding bugs in the WiX v3 code base. Bob Arnson uploaded packages last week as a test on SourceForge and this week the following installation packages were uploaded on the v3 Beta release page. (The difference bet...
A common question is how to create a Windows Installer package that installs 32-bit binaries on 32-bit platforms, and both 32- and 64-bit binaries on 64-bit platforms. If you're actually trying to install 64-bit binaries to appropriate directories and write to the 64-bit view of the registry, the short answer is that you can't build a single packag...
Last June before the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 shipped, I discussed how during administrative installations some 64-bit files overwrote some 32-bit files and I provided a transform to fix the issue. I filed a bug and the issue was fixed before .NET 2.0 shipped. Later in the release cycle the Office Crash Reporting Tool, otherwise known as the Mi...
A reader who happened across my post on Windows Installer on 64-bit Platforms mentioned a problem with running 64-bit managed custom actions using the Visual Studio 2005 Windows Installer project. This also recently cropped up in an internal discussion alias.The issue is that if you build a managed class library project targeting a 64-bit platform...
Some time back I made modifications to the previous version of my shell extensions for .NET assemblies to display differences in the column handler for both native and managed binaries targeting the x86, IA64, and x64 platform architectures. Now that the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 has released, I've updated my public drops. In a future version I'...
