Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Comparison of PatchWiz and WiX v3 Patch Build

The Windows Installer SDK ships a library named patchwiz.dll. This contains the logic to build a patch from pairs of database packages (.msi files, or simply MSIs) along with other configuration properties. Another tool that the SDK ships is msimsp.exe which uses patchwiz.dll and parses command line options. These tools consume an input file ...

Major Upgrades with Shared Components

Major upgrades are Windows Installer products that can be installed like any other product with the added benefit of removing one ore more related products. For example, version 2 of a product can be installed on a clean machine, or on a machine with version 1 already installed and will remove version 1.When another version of a product is ...

Test your conditions

When testing the serviceability of your product before you ship, it’s important to test any conditions you might have on the product, features, components, and actions.Feature conditions can set the install level of a feature when the package is installed. But as the Condition table documentation states, be sure that the condition does ...

Serviceability

It’s always important to test your product before it ships. Servicing it later can prove very costly and very difficult. It’s no different with your installation packages. You need to test not only basic install and uninstall operations, but also test your servicing plan. Problems are inevitable in practically any application, and ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 RC and Visual Studio 2010 RC Available Now

Announced yesterday for MSDN subscribers, the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidates are available today for everyone to download.Feedback on VS2010 RC has been great, and we hope you agree. Feel free to provide feedback about your installation and development experience. Performance was a major focus for the RC...

About Shared Components

Components are the basic unit of installation in a Windows Installer product. They are installed by one or more features, and can contain any number of resources including files, assemblies, registry values, and are recommended for custom resources as well. Examples of custom resources are web sites, virtual directories, SQL tables, and stored...