Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

About Shared Components

Components are the basic unit of installation in a Windows Installer product. They are installed by one or more features, and can contain any number of resources including files, assemblies, registry values, and are recommended for custom resources as well. Examples of custom resources are web sites, virtual directories, SQL tables, and stored...

WoW64 is optional in Windows Server 2008 R2 Server Core

Installation bootstrap applications are increasingly common as products chain dependencies like the Microsoft .NET Framework. Because 64-bit Windows supports both 32- and 64-bit execution, but 64-bit executables on 32-bit Windows give what some users might consider cryptic error messages, installation developers often ship a 32-bit bootstrap ...

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 Released

As announced on Soma’s blog this morning, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 have been released to MSDN Subscribers and will be available for everyone on Wednesday.Visual Studio 2010 boasts a great new user interface with better contrast and lots of UI elements that tend to add confusion to the ...

Booting Windows to a Differencing Virtual Hard Disk

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...

Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 should be removed before upgrading to Windows 7

If you have been beta testing Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1, we recommend you install a fresh copy of Windows 7 on your machine. Alternatively, you may also choose to uninstall Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET 4.0 Beta 1 prior to upgrading to Win7.Microsoft Windows 7 is available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers.ProblemIf you have ...

ATL Security Update KB971092 still offered on Microsoft Update

A security update for ATL, KB971092, is currently offered for Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 customers who have Visual C++ installed. If Microsoft Update is continuously offering this patch to you, you may need to clear up some disk space. The patch is 365MB and contains headers, libraries, and executables for most of Visual C++ including ...

Trouble installing other products after Visual Studio

Customers have commented that whenever they try to install other products or patches they continually see the following message, Another installation is in progress. You must complete that installation before continuing this one. Customers may also see instances of msiexec.exe or msiexec.exe*32 appear continuously in Task Manager or other ...

Installation sequence restrictions for multi-package transactions

Windows Installer 4.5 introduced a feature to install multiple packages in a single transaction. Multi-package transactions allow setup developers to install multiple packages as an atomic unit that are installed together, or rolled back completely. You can also apply patches to multiple products or even repair multiple products – any ...

How to work around the issue when opening Office applications repairs Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 customers have been reporting that when they start Outlook or any of the Office applications, VS2010 is repaired. This issue can also happen for VS2005 and VS2008, and for any products using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Besides being an annoyance and potentially taking a while to complete, the repair...

Detecting Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

The Visual Studio 2008 RTM and SP1 detection keys are largely the same as the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 detection keys, and are documented below. But there is a caveat for released and upcoming versions: the shared detection value can be overwritten by an older installation of the same release.For example, if you installed VS2008 Professional, ...