Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

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 ...

Uninstalling Visual Studio 2013 with VSUpdate error: Element not found

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. Symptom (image) If you attempt to uninstall Visual Studio 2013 after VSUpdate has been installed, you may see an error after a while that reads “Element not found.” ...

Visual Studio 2013 shortcuts in Windows 8.1

October 7, 2013 Oct 7, 2013 10/7/13
Heath Stewart
Windows 8.1 made a change for RTM – as some MSDN Subscribers might’ve noticed – where newly installed applications’ shortcuts are not immediately visible on the Start menu. They are still installed and indexed, but you need to either swipe down on your touch screen or click the down arrow as shown below. (image) On the Start menu, ...

Windows Installer PowerShell Module 2.2.0 Released

June 13, 2013 Jun 13, 2013 06/13/13
Heath Stewart
Years ago I released PowerShell cmdlets (“command-lets”) that make querying product and patch information easy and robust. Windows PowerShell is a powerful shell that pipes objects – not simply text – and provides full access to the .NET Framework as part of the language (though higher-level constructs are most often better). Earlier ...

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 has Released

November 27, 2012 Nov 27, 2012 11/27/12
Heath Stewart
To provide incremental value to our customers, we have released Visual Studio Update 1 and will be notifying all Visual Studio 2012 customers via toast notifications (like you get for VS package updates) soon.Soma’s blog has more information on VSUpdate in general, as well as some of the features you can expect. And check out Brian&rsquo...

Windows Installer XML (WiX) v3.6 Released

September 6, 2012 Sep 6, 2012 09/6/12
Heath Stewart
The Windows Installer XML (WiX) team has released version 3.6 which, most notably, released a powerful and customizable chainer named Burn. The Visual Studio 2012 setup applications were built on Burn using features such as package caching, reference counting, and sticky patching to improve the overall experience from past releases.Head on ...