Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Windows Installer XML (WiX) v3 Beta Released

Since plans were made to ship WiX v3 in the box for Visual Studio 2010, the WiX working group has been working on fixing all outstanding bugs in the WiX v3 code base. Bob Arnson uploaded packages last week as a test on SourceForge and this week the following installation packages were uploaded on the v3 Beta release page. (The ...

Help Improve the .NET Framework Deployment Experience

My colleague Peter Marcu, who is leading the development effort on the new deployment experience for the .NET Framework, is seeking information from our developer customers how you deploy the .NET Framework for your applications. If you’re a developer who requires and needs to deploy the .NET Framework to support your applications, ...

ISA Proxy Client may be required to download VS 2008 SP1

If you're on a network that uses Microsoft ISA Server or another proxy server, you may have problems downloading Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. The error dialog displays the following. The installation failed with the follow message: Fatal error during installation. Click the Finish button to exit. SolutionDownload and install the ...

Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 Released

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1, Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, and Team Foundation Server 2008 Service Pack 1 have been released. This is a big release on the heals of SQL Server 2008 which has a dependency on .and includes NET Framework 3.5 SP1.This is a big release with many new features and improvements over previous ...

The Release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will Install over SP1 Beta

One of many improvements made to Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 is that VS 2008 SP1 Beta customers will not need to uninstall SP1 Beta before installing the release of SP1. The same is true for Visual Studio 2008 Express products and .NET 3.5 SP1 - both of which are complete upgrades to older products that may already be on the system or ...

Changes for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) has been released to web, along with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta). Included as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 are Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 (Beta) and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 2 (Beta). Visual Studio 2008 SP1 includes over 250 new features and ...

Visual Studio and .NET Log Collection Utility

Setup and deployment is a tricky business. Machines can be in many different and often unforeseen states that cause setup to fail. But rarely will setup actually crash, and that is why setup logs are vital to diagnose install, repair, and uninstall problems. Setup applications for Visual Studio and .NET may write to many different logs ...

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 Fails to Install

A lot of customers have recently started seeing the following errors, all stating in various ways that Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 failed to install. You may also see this when attempting to install other updates on top of .NET 2.0 SP1. The error you will see depends on how you are applying updates. If you are installing .NET 2...

Functional Testing of Cmdlets

While developing unit and functional tests for Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions, I needed a way to invoke cmdlets without requiring elevation on Vista. That is, of course, because running elevated has always been a bad idea unless it is required. In order to load a PowerShell snap-in, however, one must write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE which ...

Get Binder Variables for Assemblies without Installing into the GAC

Binder variables in WiX are variables that are resolved, coincidentally, at bind time. This is when the linker, light.exe, collects file information, assigns auto-GUIDs, and generates the output packages among other things. There are binder variables for all versioned binaries, and binder variables specific to both managed and native ...