Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Installation Archives - Page 19 of 25 - Visual Studio Setup

Run ICE Validation and Fix Errors

June 8, 2006 Jun 8, 2006 06/8/06
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer is a powerful yet complex technology. There are a lot of rules that have to be followed to be able to successfully install, maintain, and uninstall your product and to retain the functionality and tidy clean-up capabilities of Windows Installer. To this end, Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) exist to aid in validating ...

File Sequencing and How Files are Located

May 19, 2006 May 19, 2006 05/19/06
Heath Stewart
The File table in a Windows Installer package has a Sequence column that begins with 1. Besides determining in what order files are to be installed, this column serves another, relatively more important function: determining where the source files are located.In concert with the Media table, a range of sequence numbers identify in which ...

Calculating Required Space for Installation

April 20, 2006 Apr 20, 2006 04/20/06
Heath Stewart
Installing a Windows Installer product package requires a certain amount of space on disk, even if all the installation is doing is running a custom action. Besides file costing and other actions typically sandwiched between the CostInitialize and CostFinalize standard actions, Windows Installer will require space under %WINDIR%Installer to ...

Avoid Overwriting Files in Administrative Installations

April 14, 2006 Apr 14, 2006 04/14/06
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Detecting Patches in .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005

April 7, 2006 Apr 7, 2006 04/7/06
Heath Stewart
Aaron Stebner posted some sample code to detect whether the .NET Framework 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0 were installed and at what service pack level they are. Basically, the .NET Framework installation writes a common, version-specific registry key in the following location along with an SP level registry value. The sample below for an English (United ...

Patch Files Extractor

April 7, 2006 Apr 7, 2006 04/7/06
Heath Stewart
Previously I discussed conceptually how to extract files from a patch, mentioning that the transforms contained within patches are stored as sub-storages and the cabinets that contain the files are stored as sub-streams. I've had a tool for a while that extracts the transforms and cabinets from a .msp file and wanted to share the slightly ...

Opening Patch Files when Compiled for Unicode

March 31, 2006 Mar 31, 2006 03/31/06
Heath Stewart
If you want to open a .msp file with the Windows Installer APIs, you must pass MSIDBOPEN_PATCHFILE to the MsiOpenDatabase function, or ERROR_OPEN_FAILED (110) is returned. Below is the definition of both MSIDBOPEN_PATCHFILE and MSIDBOPEN_READONLY from msiquery.h in the Windows Installer SDK.#define MSIDBOPEN_READONLY (LPCTSTR)0#define ...

Specifying the Code Page for Patch Tables

March 27, 2006 Mar 27, 2006 03/27/06
Heath Stewart
Code pages describe a character set. In MSI Databases and Code Pages I described how Windows Installer databases use a code page for the string pool, as well that the summary information stream uses its own code page in PID_CODEPAGE (1) to describe strings in the summary information stream. There is a bug, however, when creating a .msp patch ...

Identifying Administrative Installation Patches

March 24, 2006 Mar 24, 2006 03/24/06
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer has the ability to create administrative installations, which is a copy of the .msi database and files that have been expanded into a source directory structure. These administrative installations can easily be deployed using Active Directory group policy deployment among other things, such as creating patches since ...

Formatting Properties

March 21, 2006 Mar 21, 2006 03/21/06
Heath Stewart
A frequently asked question is about why property values in the Property table aren't formatted when the values contain properties themselves, such as:[ProductName] is copyright by [Manufacturer].The reason these property values aren't formatted is because the Value column type is simply Text, not Formatted. Other formattable column types ...