Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Insert GUIDs directly into Visual Studio Code

Let me preface this by stating I love Visual Studio Code! While I think its big, older brother Visual Studio is great for large solutions or even small projects where project files are managed automatically by the IDE, Code work great for small, loose projects and is very fast. I still use Vim for a lot of quick edits in a console (I spend a ...

Dictionary of Windows Installer Tokens

If you are writing emails and specifications about Windows Installer all day, chances are your document or mail editor has plenty of squiggly red lines highlighting your presumed spelling errors like MsiPatchSequence. To not miss any actual spelling errors, I find myself double-checking and adding lots of Windows Installer terms to my custom ...

Windows Installer Dictionary

Attached is a Unicode-encoded, English locale-sorted text file with many table, column, API, and flag tokens you can use as a spelling dictionary in many applications including Microsoft Word and Outlook email. To support Microsoft Word, Outlook email, and other Microsoft Office products, msi.zip...

The Essentials, or Heath's Greatest Hits

People commonly ask me what to start reading to learn about Windows Installer. Internally I point people to a wiki I maintain with lots of links to various sources, and some of those links are to my own blog posts. Externally I typically link to all these same sources, and typing all those links and maintaining the list becomes tedious. So I'...

Comment Policy

Comments may be made on blog posts for up to 90 days and trackbacks are currently disabled until an issue is fixed. It is unfortunately given the educational nature of this blog, but this is a way to eliminate a lot of spam.If you have questions about my post, I urge you to search my blog in whole first. If you do not find your answer, feel ...

Windows Live Search for Mobile 1.0 Released

Windows Live Search for Mobile 1.0 has been released as announced on Live Search's blog. I used the beta for a while and really like this mobile smart client. It has a lot of capabilities driven from Live Search, but the screenshot below is one of its best features. It also supports category searches and shows traffic for major cities. (image...

OpenSearch Discovery for this Blog

Attached is the OpenSearch Discovery document for http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths. You can also use this file in Windows 7 Federated Search. Federated Search lets you search the web and other locations for different document types all within Windows. To add this search to Windows 7, follow these simple instructions. This should add "Heath's ...

Comment Policy Change

Effective immediately, I am changing comment options on this blog to only allow comments for posts made within the last 60 days. Like Sara and most – if not all – other bloggers on this site, I get a lot of comment spam and it takes too much time to wade through, and in the past I've accidentally deleted a couple of comments or ...

Been Busy on Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

I've been away for a while, though I've barely left the Microsoft campus. As we prepare for Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, I've been very busy with issues: especially an issue with the size of the patch. Visual Studio is probably the biggest product (in terms of the number of files at least; I do know of a couple products using ...