Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Uninstalling Visual Studio 2013 with VSUpdate error: Element not found

Our first public release of Visual Studio Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 is available. There are, however, a couple of known issues in hopefully uncommon scenarios. Symptom (image) If you attempt to uninstall Visual Studio 2013 after VSUpdate has been installed, you may see an error after a while that reads “Element not found.” ...

Windows Installer PowerShell Module 2.2.0 Released

Years ago I released PowerShell cmdlets (“command-lets”) that make querying product and patch information easy and robust. Windows PowerShell is a powerful shell that pipes objects – not simply text – and provides full access to the .NET Framework as part of the language (though higher-level constructs are most often better). Earlier ...

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 has Released

To provide incremental value to our customers, we have released Visual Studio Update 1 and will be notifying all Visual Studio 2012 customers via toast notifications (like you get for VS package updates) soon.Soma’s blog has more information on VSUpdate in general, as well as some of the features you can expect. And check out Brian&rsquo...

Windows Installer XML (WiX) v3.6 Released

The Windows Installer XML (WiX) team has released version 3.6 which, most notably, released a powerful and customizable chainer named Burn. The Visual Studio 2012 setup applications were built on Burn using features such as package caching, reference counting, and sticky patching to improve the overall experience from past releases.Head on ...

Visual Studio 2012 RTM will not install on pre-release versions of Windows 8

SymptomCustomers installing Visual Studio 2012 RTM on pre-release versions of Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 may see the following error after launching the setup application: The .Net Framework installed on this machine does not meet the minimum required version: 4.5.50709. This is a blocking error and only allows the install to be canceled...

Visual Studio 2012 can only install to certified Windows To Go drives

Windows To Go is a cool new enterprise features to enable a mobile workforce to carry around an enterprise-managed installation of Windows on a USB thumb drive. However, only certified thumb drives appear as fixed drives and, therefore, Visual Studio 2012 can only install to certified drives. VS2012, like some other products, only supports ...

Upgrading from Visual Studio 2012 RC to RTM

Now that Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 have been released, some customers are wondering if they need to uninstall the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate (RC) first before upgraded. In general, the answer is “no”. VS2012 RC will upgrade to RTM, but there are a few things to note: For more information about ...

Detection keys for Visual Studio 2012

Administrators and developers who need to detect if Visual Studio 2012 is installed on a machine can use similar keys as those used for past releases like Visual Studio 2010. In general, these detection keys are always found in the 32-bit registry hive with a pattern like: So if you needed to detect if VS2012 Ultimate is installed, you ...