Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
September 12, 2014Sep 12, 201409/12/14I previously blogged about a problem some customers were running into that prevented Visual Studio Update from installing. You might see a dialog like the one to the right and an error message that read something like,
Update 2 does not apply,
August 21, 2014Aug 21, 201408/21/14One frequently asked question is, “how do we register our program for a file extension when other versions (or programs) that handle it might also be installed?”
The overarching question is really about how to have non-shared resources both write to a shared resource.
March 7, 2012Mar 7, 201203/7/12Users have asked why space is required on the system drive (typically the C: drive) when they choose to install Visual Studio 11 to another drive.
While Visual Studio 11 does allow you to install the majority of features to another drive,
February 20, 2011Feb 20, 201102/20/11Often I’m asked why installing a Windows Installer patch (MSP) takes as long or longer to install than the target product (MSI). While this isn’t always the case for every patch, it’s certainly possible for a number of reasons. It may also come as a surprise that the size of the patch can have little to do with the time to install the patch.
September 8, 2010Sep 8, 201009/8/10Shared components define shared resources. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to understand that whatever you do to a shared resource during the installation of one product affects those same resources for any other product. For example, when upgrading one product to update files shared with another product,
August 24, 2010Aug 24, 201008/24/10The 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.
August 21, 2010Aug 21, 201008/21/10After installing the last several releases of Visual Studio, you’ll find shortcuts to command prompts that automatically set up the PATH, INCLUDE, LIB, and other environment variables. At least with Visual Studio 2010 these command prompts have larger buffers and enable quick edit mode,
February 15, 2010Feb 15, 201002/15/10When 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.
February 10, 2010Feb 10, 201002/10/10If you have downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) from MSDN or the Download Center as an ISO and are having problems installing it, it could be that either the ISO wasn’t downloaded correctly or that it wasn’t burnt to DVD correctly.
February 13, 2009Feb 13, 200902/13/09Question
When I run ICE validation, why does ICE03 state the following error?
ICE03 ERROR Invalid template string; Table: Error, Column: Message, Key(s): 1958
The string reads,
ユーザー [2] の特権が不十分です。必要な特権をユーザーに付与してインストールを続行しますか? [いいえ] を選択するとインストールは終了します。
Answer
This ICE error can appear in several columns in several tables that use the Formatted column type or a derivative,
