Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Mailbag Archives - Visual Studio Setup

Workaround for when Visual Studio Update says it doesn’t apply

September 12, 2014 Sep 12, 2014 09/12/14
Heath Stewart
I 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, or is blocked by another condition on your computer. At least for many people, they had an ...

Why Visual Studio 11 Requires Space on the System Drive

March 7, 2012 Mar 7, 2012 03/7/12
Heath Stewart
Users 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, VS11 still requires space on the system drive for the following reasons: For Visual Studio ...

A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product

February 20, 2011 Feb 20, 2011 02/20/11
Heath Stewart
Often 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 ...

Downgrading Shared Components

September 8, 2010 Sep 8, 2010 09/8/10
Heath Stewart
Shared 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, that other product ...

Comparison of PatchWiz and WiX v3 Patch Build

August 24, 2010 Aug 24, 2010 08/24/10
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Customizing Shortcuts for Visual Studio

August 21, 2010 Aug 21, 2010 08/21/10
Heath Stewart
After 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, but some people like to customize these shortcuts ...

Test your conditions

February 15, 2010 Feb 15, 2010 02/15/10
Heath Stewart
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 ...

Verify ISO before burning or mounting Visual Studio 2010 RC

February 10, 2010 Feb 10, 2010 02/10/10
Heath Stewart
If 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.On the installation error dialog, you will find a link to the installation log. ...