Tip Archives

How to relocate the Package Cache

Heath Stewart February 11, 2014 Feb 11, 2014 02/11/14

Visual 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, servicing, and even uninstall. This ...

Delete shadow copies to compact VHDs and AVHDs

Heath Stewart December 7, 2010 Dec 7, 2010 12/7/10

For a few years my primary development machine has actually been a VM with source located on a physical hard drive attached to the VM. This helps reduce latency compared to a differencing disk (AVHD) which may need to expand to accommodate additional data (common when building). It’s also easier to maintain than multiple boot entries ...

Testing for components that install under TARGETDIR

Heath Stewart February 26, 2010 Feb 26, 2010 02/26/10

A while back I explained how Windows Installer sets the TARGETDIR property to the root of the fixed drive with the most free space available. The problem is that even an attached USB external drive can appear as a fixed drive, and these may be later detached. If components are installed to that drive and the drive is detached, repairing, ...

How to install local help content after installing Visual Studio 2010 RC

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

After the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) is installed, there is a button to install the documentation locally. If you have overlooked this option or chose not to install documentation locally and wish to do so later, you can follow these instructions. You can now browse selected documentation ...

Booting Windows to a Differencing Virtual Hard Disk

Heath Stewart October 13, 2009 Oct 13, 2009 10/13/09

Testing software can be fun and rewarding. You get to see new, upcoming features and provide valuable feedback to the developer. But as with most pre-release software, we recommend that you don’t install it on production machines. You could dedicate extra machines for testing, or even test in a virtual machine. Virtual machines are great for...

Enable BITS Logging

Heath Stewart July 7, 2008 Jul 7, 2008 07/7/08

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 uses a new bootstrap application that chains several packages together for a seamless installation experience. Because VS2008 SP1 contains a lot of fixes and new features, it is also quite large - almost 3 times as large as VS2005 SP1.To download all this data, we use the Background Intelligent ...

Functional Testing of Cmdlets

Heath Stewart April 7, 2008 Apr 7, 2008 04/7/08

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 ...

Group by Different Properties for Format-Table

Heath Stewart March 15, 2008 Mar 15, 2008 03/15/08

For 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. The format-table cmdlet doesn't support multiple properties and doesn't appear ...

Get Binder Variables for Assemblies without Installing into the GAC

Heath Stewart February 8, 2008 Feb 8, 2008 02/8/08

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 ...

How to Install TFC without PPE

Heath Stewart November 20, 2007 Nov 20, 2007 11/20/07

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, now available for MSDN subscribers and Express editions freely available to everyone, is a huge application. It takes a while to install and, in the case of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, a long time to patch. Installing or patching multiple copies of shared components can be time-consuming. So if you've ...

Visual Studio Setup

Tip Archives - Visual Studio Setup