Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

VS2013 Archives - Visual Studio Setup

vswhere now searches older versions of Visual Studio

March 11, 2017 Mar 11, 2017 03/11/17
Heath Stewart
One 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. Even if you don't have Visual Studio 2017 or newer installed - which means the query API is not even registered - you can use vswhere to find the installation root directory for Visual ...

Removing Visual Studio components left behind after an uninstall

July 17, 2015 Jul 17, 2015 07/17/15
Heath Stewart
When you install Visual Studio and related content like Windows Kits or some add-ons, most packages that comprise those bundles are reference counted to make sure they are not removed prematurely. Uninstalling Visual Studio and related content should eventually remove those packages (i.e. last one out the door turns off the light). Contrast ...

Redirect the Package Cache using registry-based policy

June 9, 2015 Jun 9, 2015 06/9/15
Heath Stewart
Visual Studio can require a lot of space on the system drive, and previous methods of redirecting the Package Cache can be tricky for some people to set up or even maintain as junctions across volumes may be removed on boot. The cache is there for good reasons and has significantly reduced the failure rate, but for people with smaller system ...

Visual Studio 2013 continuously repairs producing many small log files

April 20, 2015 Apr 20, 2015 04/20/15
Heath Stewart
If you have Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Professional, Premium, or Ultimate editions installed and are finding many small MSI*.log files in your %TEMP% directory, you may find you are running low on disk space because of how many of these files are created. While they may only be about 3MB, what causes these files to be produced can do so ...

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 ...

Update does not apply or is blocked by another condition on your computer

May 23, 2014 May 23, 2014 05/23/14
Heath Stewart
We have investigated reports of some installs of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 reporting that no applicable updates are available even when VS2013 is installed. We have been unable to reproduce the cause in our labs and besides offering a workaround, we would like to ask for your assistance if you can reproduce the problem in the specific ...

Incorrect hash value when installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

May 1, 2014 May 1, 2014 05/1/14
Heath Stewart
Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC introduces some cool new features and adds an option to slipstream the install of VS2013 RTM with Update 2 RC, but some attempts to download it have had the following problem. Problem When installing VS2013 Update 2 you see the error or warning message, “The hash value is not correct.” This will show up as ...

Error in installation log for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC can be misleading

April 17, 2014 Apr 17, 2014 04/17/14
Heath Stewart
Given many of the exciting announcements and features demonstrated recently at Build 2014, customers are downloading Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC. This update is quite a bit bigger than VS2013 Update 1 since it contains many new features. A small number of customers, however, are experiencing problems installing VS2013.2 RC. Symptoms ...

How to relocate the Package Cache

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

Upgrading Visual Studio 2013 Update to a newer Update may be slow

January 21, 2014 Jan 21, 2014 01/21/14
Heath Stewart
Our first public release of Visual Studio Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 is available. There are, however, a couple of known issues in hopefully uncommon scenarios. Fixed We have fixed this in future versions of Visual Studio Update. This post is kept for historical reasons should any users have problems upgrading from pre-release ...