Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

How to Install TFC without PPE

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, now available for MSDN subscribers and Express editions freely available to everyone, is a huge application. It takes a while to install and, in the case of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, a long time to patch. Installing or patching multiple copies of shared components can be time-consuming. So if you've ...

Detection Logic fixed for KB937061 (MS07-052)

Customers have been offered KB937061 for Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 from Microsoft Update when they have already installed it. The Microsoft Security Response Center blog has more information about the problem and what they have done to fix it.I wanted to add that because patches are cached according to their package code, you do not ...

Windows Installer 4.5 Beta Available

Windows Installer 4.5 Beta is now available to those signed up through Connect. Along with the whitepapers posted earlier, binaries for x86, x64, and IA64; headers; and libraries are all available.Expect to see more technical details on individual Windows Installer 4.5 features in the weeks to come...

Performance Issue to be Addressed in .NET 3.5

Current .NET Framework patches may not NGEN some assemblies as was recently discovered for KB928365. We have worked out a solution and Surupa Biswas, a PM on the CLR team, wanted me to pass along the following information. As indicated in this post, an update to the CLR or to just the Framework 2.0 assemblies can leave applications based on ...

Windows Live Writer Plugin for MSDN URLs

I have posted a Windows Live Writer plugin I wrote to aide posting URLs to MSDN, simply named Paste MSDN URL. It removes, if present, the culture in the URL so that when a reader clicks the link he or she sees the content on MSDN in their preferred language if a translation is available.So, http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372866....

Introducing Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions

Some time back I mentioned in a comment I was working on some PowerShell extensions for Windows Installer. Actually, it was a long time ago and I've spent more time learning the "ins" and "outs" of PowerShell (mostly the "ins" using .NET Reflector because the documentation needs work) than actually writing anything. Then, of course, there was ...

Virtual PC 2007 Released and Available for Free Download

Virtual machines are great for testing product installation and update scenarios. I use Virtual Server currently with a base platform and undo disks enabled to test installation. When done – no matter what the impact is to my virtual machine – I click "Turn off Virtual Machine and Discard Undo Disks". Within seconds the machine is ...