Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Save Time when Installing Patches

Beginning with Windows Installer 3.0 you can install multiple patches at once, i.e. in a single install transaction. To do this you pass a semicolon-delimited list of fully-qualified paths to patches to the property. Windows Installer 2.0-style patches are sequenced first in the ordered specified, but then 3.0-style patches are sequenced ...

Windows Installer on 64-bit Platforms

Beginning with Windows Installer 2.0 installation developers can write installation packages that target 64-bit platforms. At first only IA64 was supported but support for AMD64 — now collectively referred to along with EM64T as x64 — was added in Windows Installer 3.0. Many questions are asked regarding how to author 64-bit ...

x64 Windows Platforms have Shipped

Not so long ago, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 for x64 were released to manufacturing (RTM'd). Today, they have finally shipped and are available to consumers, but you won't find these yet on retail sales shelves.Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is available on x64 machines now, and users with x64 machines now can exchange their 32-bit...

Hacking the CAB for Smaller Patches

Working on 32- and 64-bit patch support for Developer Division projects like the .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, I've been involved with many threads and in many meetings about the various scenarios and solutions for producing patches that target our supported platform architectures. .NET will ship in three different flavors ...

64-bit Windows is Here

Yesterday was a truly remarkable day. Not since Windows NT 3.1 released in 1993 have we seen such a shift in computing on Windows to another architecture. Windows Server 2003 SP1 for x64 and Windows XP Professional for x64 were released to manufacturing (RTM). While Windows Server 2003 was RTM'd for the Intel Itanium (ia64) in March of 2003 as...

x86 and ia64 and x64, oh my!

With the .NET Framework 2.0 now supporting 64-bit platforms, I have begun work on upgrading our patch build system to handle 64-bit patches. It's been quite an adventure down the yellow-brick road of 64 bitness that I think is worth sharing.Why does the .NET Framework need to support 64-bit platforms, though? While most IL modules ...