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Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
April 17, 2014Apr 17, 201404/17/14Given many of the exciting announcements and features demonstrated recently at Build 2014, customers are downloading Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC. This update is quite a bit bigger than VS2013 Update 1 since it contains many new features. A small number of customers,
February 26, 2010Feb 26, 201002/26/10A 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,
May 22, 2009May 22, 200905/22/09Last Monday we shipped Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 to MSDN customers, and made them publicly available Wednesday. More information about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 are available on MSDN, and Aaron Stebner has a good collection of direct links.
May 20, 2009May 20, 200905/20/09Using the Collect Utility
If you encounter any setup issues, we will need all relevant logs. Please follow the instructions below to collect all those logs.
Download collect.exe from the link below.
You may choose to save the tool for later use,
July 7, 2008Jul 7, 200807/7/08Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 uses a new bootstrap application that chains several packages together for a seamless installation experience. Because VS2008 SP1 contains a lot of fixes and new features, it is also quite large – almost 3 times as large as VS2005 SP1.
July 7, 2008Jul 7, 200807/7/08The attached ZIP file contains scripts to both enable and disable logging for the Background Intelligent Transfer Service, or BITS. Both scripts must be run elevated so on Windows Vista or newer open an elevated command prompt and run these scripts.
May 10, 2008May 10, 200805/10/08Setup and deployment is a tricky business. Machines can be in many different and often unforeseen states that cause setup to fail. But rarely will setup actually crash, and that is why setup logs are vital to diagnose install, repair, and uninstall problems.
April 22, 2008Apr 22, 200804/22/08The tool msizap.exe that is available in the Windows SDK and elsewhere on the web (remember to always download from a trusted source) is a powerful but dangerous tool that is often used to quickly and casually, and can leave your machine in a corrupted state if not used correctly.
February 12, 2008Feb 12, 200802/12/08Debugging custom actions isn’t exactly the easiest action to do; Windows Installer spawns separate processes – remoting servers – to run in-process custom actions. Any opportunity to diagnose issues without debugging can be helpful.
For example, an issue that comes up from time to time is leaked handles.
February 21, 2006Feb 21, 200602/21/06Installing a patch will often mean that files are to be updated, though patching isn’t limited or even required to just patch files. Starting with Windows Installer 3.0 you can find the final sequence of patches to be installed or reinstalled in a verbose log file similar to the following:
MSI (c) (8C:C4) [14:27:53:319]: Final Patch Application Order:MSI (c) (8C:C4) [14:27:53:319]: {3DB7C93B-AA16-49E8-9D9E-D427F2C5DDEB}MSI (c) (8C:C4) [14:27:53:319]: {685E109C-738F-4575-B1FA-CF645F3611F0} –
