Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Windows Installer Cache

Windows Installer packages may contain streams identified in the Media table if the Cabinet column value begins with the number sign #, as documented for the Cabinet data type. This cabinet is embedded as a stream within the .msi file and contains files referenced in the File table using their File key column value. When packages are installed...

Blog Customizations, Part 3: OO JavaScript

Not satisfied by the search feature provided by Community Server I've again created some helpful JavaScript classes this time using object-oriented JavaScript to define a basic search provider and to subclass that for specialized providers like MSN Search. I defined several private properties and several privileged methods that can access ...

Shell Extensions for .NET Assemblies, Version 1.4.1993

Some time back I made modifications to the previous version of my shell extensions for .NET assemblies to display differences in the column handler for both native and managed binaries targeting the x86, IA64, and x64 platform architectures. Now that the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 has released, I've updated my public drops. (image) In a ...

Waiting for msiexec.exe to Finish

Since Windows Installer 1.0 was first released, msiexec.exe has always run in the Windows subsystem. That means that when it is executed from the console or by a batch script control returns to the console or script immediately. If you depend upon the variable being set accordingly it won't be. In this scenario I like to use from the command...

Windows Installer Supportability

Because newer versions of Windows Installer are released with new functionality dependent on operating system features, and older versions of Windows reach the end of their support lifecycle, different versions of Windows Installer are supported on different versions of Windows. Below is the supportability matrix for what versions of Windows ...

Save Time when Installing Patches

Beginning with Windows Installer 3.0 you can install multiple patches at once, i.e. in a single install transaction. To do this you pass a semicolon-delimited list of fully-qualified paths to patches to the property. Windows Installer 2.0-style patches are sequenced first in the ordered specified, but then 3.0-style patches are sequenced ...