Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
March 11, 2017Mar 11, 201703/11/17One of the top requests I kept hearing for vswhere was to also search older versions of Visual Studio. You can now do that starting with the latest release.
1 | vswhere -legacy -latest -property installationPath |
Even if you don’t have Visual Studio 2017 or newer installed –
January 25, 2017Jan 25, 201701/25/17To make the new setup configuration APIs more accessible to developers, we have published the “VSSetup” PowerShell module on powershellgallery.com, making it quick and easy to install.
If you have Windows Management Framework (WMF) 5.0 or newer – installed with Windows 10 –
December 18, 2015Dec 18, 201512/18/15Many years ago when PowerShell was first in beta, I saw an opportunity to write cmdlets that I could string together in different ways rather than writing and maintaining a bunch of one-off Windows scripts for various day-to-day tasks and customer diagnostics.
February 11, 2014Feb 11, 201402/11/14Visual Studio can require a lot of space on the system drive. Based on years of data collected from customers’ installations from the Customer Experience Improvement Program, we took advantage of this feature in Burn – the Windows Installer XML (WiX) chainer – to eliminate most errors during repair,
July 3, 2013Jul 3, 201307/3/13Yesterday I released servicing update 2.2.1, which updates 2.2.0 to fix a few bugs and add a few cool new features:
You can define the [string] $MsiAttributeColumnFormat variable to dictate how attribute columns should appear. The values you can pass are the same as the enumeration format strings,
April 7, 2008Apr 7, 200804/7/08While 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,
March 15, 2008Mar 15, 200803/15/08For my Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions, I’ve been simplifying some of the use cases and adding additional formats. One thing I wanted to do was display source list information in a table and group either by the attached ProductCode or PatchCode properties.
February 8, 2008Feb 8, 200802/8/08Binder 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 assemblies or exclusive to one or the other.
May 18, 2007May 18, 200705/18/07To write an installer for your PowerShell snap-in, the PowerShell documentation instructs you to extend the PSSnapIn or CustomPSSnapIn class. When you add your snap-in assembly to the Custom Action view in a Windows Installer Project in Visual Studio, the InstallerClass property should be set to True and your installer class will be run when the Windows Installer package gets installed.
April 10, 2007Apr 10, 200704/10/07I have released Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions 1.0 beta, complete with an installer package. I have also added a couple of cmdlets, and format and type configurations for a good out-of-the-box experience when using the cmdlets Get-MSIProductInfo, Get-MSIPatchInfo, and Get-MSIRelatedProductInfo.
When I introduced PSMSI,
