Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

UAC Archives - Visual Studio Setup

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 ...

Changes to Package Caching in Windows Installer 5.0

February 2, 2009 Feb 2, 2009 02/2/09
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer 5.0 is shipping in Windows 7 as part of the operating system. To address the issue where the User Account Control consent dialog is displayed with an “Unidentified Publisher”, the .msi package is cached in its entirety.Prior to Windows Installer 5.0, installation packages, or .msi files, were stripped of their ...

AppCompat in Windows Installer

November 6, 2007 Nov 6, 2007 11/6/07
Heath Stewart
The Application Compatibility (AppCompat) platform in Windows is a powerful feature that allows for fixes on practically any program or package to be loaded on Windows. Windows Installer takes advantage of a protected database full of fixes in the form of transforms and custom action shims.While looking in a verbose Windows Installer log, you ...

Immediate Custom Actions Always Impersonate

July 12, 2007 Jul 12, 2007 07/12/07
Heath Stewart
Windows Installer is a client/server application. When you install a package using msiexec.exe - which is executed by default in response to shell verbs such as Install - or APIs like MsiInstallProduct the package is initially processed under the user's credentials. This means, of course, that in over-the-shoulder elevation when administrative...

Windows Installer Errors 2738 and 2739 with Script Custom Actions

May 31, 2007 May 31, 2007 05/31/07
Heath Stewart
Windows Script custom actions should be avoided. They are difficult to debug, get blocked by virus scanners, and are far more susceptible to machine state than native custom actions. That is indicated by Windows Installer error messages 2738 and 2739, which read: As some people have found, re-registering the runtime libraries vbscript.dll ...

Custom Action Guidelines

April 20, 2007 Apr 20, 2007 04/20/07
Heath Stewart
Rob Mensching, father of Windows Installer XML (WiX), blogs about why managed custom actions are a bad idea. Aaron Stebner follows up by saying (and has said before): How do you know what's natively supported? Those who know me already know what I'm going to say: read the docs. The Windows Installer SDK has some information if you look for it...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Available

March 7, 2007 Mar 7, 2007 03/7/07
Heath Stewart
As Aaron notes, the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista is available on the download center. This patch is available for all supported languages of Visual Studio 2005, unlike the beta which was available in English and Japanese. You should first uninstall the beta update for Vista. Note that you do not have to right-...

The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Installation Experience

December 29, 2006 Dec 29, 2006 12/29/06
Heath Stewart
Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 can take a long time to install and may apply to multiple products on your machine, appearing to install multiple times. This is a large service pack and installs a lot of files, fixing many issues and adding several new features to over 200 Visual Studio 2005 editions. What follows is a detailed description ...

Mitigating Custom Action Problems for Patches on Vista

October 25, 2006 Oct 25, 2006 10/25/06
Heath Stewart
Because some of the custom actions in Visual Studio 2005 are authored to impersonate the non-privileged token of the invoking user on Vista, a mitigation has been checked in for the patch wrapper that is used to add additional compression for the patch and to patch multiple products, if present, without rebooting in between. The native wrapper...

Impersonating the Right Token in Vista

October 20, 2006 Oct 20, 2006 10/20/06
Heath Stewart
In The NoImpersonate Bit Mistake, Robert Flaming of the Windows Installer team discusses how some custom actions may fail because they impersonate the non-privileged client token and won't be able to perform some actions. Such a scenario is described in Custom Actions under UAC on Vista. For administrative users on Vista, a client token would ...