Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Why Windows Installer May Require so much Disk Space

Windows Installer is an engine for performing transactional installations. When installing a product for the fist time, most often few or no files to be installed are already present on the machine. But when upgrading or patching a product, most often those files are replaced so copies must be kept if an error occurs and the installation needs...

Visual Studio and .NET Log Collection Utility

Setup and deployment is a tricky business. Machines can be in many different and often unforeseen states that cause setup to fail. But rarely will setup actually crash, and that is why setup logs are vital to diagnose install, repair, and uninstall problems. Setup applications for Visual Studio and .NET may write to many different logs ...

Progress for New Patches

You asked. We answered. One source of problems for Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 was that VS 2005 SP1 targeted multiple products, and if you had multiple target products installed - most commonly Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 that uses our IDE - multiple instances of dialogs would spawn. Some people thought SP1 was installing ...

Unchanged Files Break Patch Uninstall

I've discussed a couple different reasons that Windows Installer 3.0-style patches - those with the MsiPatchMetadata table in the patch package itself - might not be uninstallable. I explained another reason in a discussion about the new patch build support in Windows Installer XML (WiX) v3 recently, describing why unchanged files should not ...

Hotfix Published for KB925336

When installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, users may see an error that reads, Error 1718.File D:WINDOWSInstaller50baad.msp was rejected by digital signature policy. I've published instructions to work around this issue using either the Management Console snap-in or the registry, the latter including a sample batch script to automate VS...

VS 2005 SP1 Update for Vista Requires VS 2005 SP1

If you're attempting to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista without having installed Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 first on all applicable products, you will receive Windows error 1642, which reads, The installer cannot install the upgrade patch because the program being upgraded may be missing or the ...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Available

As Aaron notes, the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista is available on the download center. This patch is available for all supported languages of Visual Studio 2005, unlike the beta which was available in English and Japanese. You should first uninstall the beta update for Vista. Note that you do not have to right-...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is Hot – Maybe too Hot

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is a big release with many fixes and lots of new features. But with several known issues related to its size, SP1 is a hot issue - maybe a little too hot. A couple of customers were encountering a problem while when installing VS 2005 SP1 their laptops would reset - not reboot. After generating verbose logs ...

KB925336 Updated with Better Workaround

When installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, users may see an error that reads, Error 1718.File D:WINDOWSInstaller50baad.msp was rejected by digital signature policy. While the filename will be different, the result is that the patch will not install. We first ran into this problem with the beta internally, and through investigation I ...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Rollback Breaks Some Applications

When installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, there are a number of errors that might occur due to insufficient disk space. You might see an error like the following that reads, Error 1307.There is not enough disk space to install this file: D:WINDOWSSymbolsdllmfc80d.IA64.pdb. Free some disk space and click Retry, or click Cancel to exit...