Visual Studio Setup

Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products

Mitigating Custom Action Problems for Patches on Vista

Because some of the custom actions in Visual Studio 2005 are authored to impersonate the non-privileged token of the invoking user on Vista, a mitigation has been checked in for the patch wrapper that is used to add additional compression for the patch and to patch multiple products, if present, without rebooting in between. The native wrapper...

VS 2005 SP1 Tries to Install Multiple Times

Some customers are reporting that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta tries to install multiple times. There are a couple of actions that can reproduce this issue. First, because the SP1 patch is so large, it takes a while for wrapper to extract it. You can verify this by watching the working memory set increase in the task manager. Without...

VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Quite a few beta customers have reported that the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta install requires a lot of space. This is by design a feature of Windows Installer. The amount of space required to install the patch can be reduced but a lot of space is still consumed after the patch is installed. Patches are cached in whole because when ...

VS 2005 SP1 Takes a While to Install

One of the most-reported feedback issues with Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta is about how long it takes to install. There are, unfortunately, a couple things that account for this and currently nothing we can do to prevent them. We have been considering options to at least inform the users what to expect when installing VS 2005 SP1, ...

Introducing the Patch Applicability Browser

Today I'm pleased to announce that Sara has helped me post a useful tool I wrote to help eliminate confusion to which products a patch applies and which of those products are installed on your system. There has been quite a bit of confusion because there are a lot of Visual Studio editions, and the Integrated Development Environment, or IDE, ...

Custom Actions under UAC in Vista

Visual Studio 2005 works for the most part on Windows Vista, but there are some known issues being addressed beyond SP1. One compatibility issue when running on Vista with UAC enabled may actually occur when installing the recently released SP1 beta on certain editions of Visual Studio 2005. User Account Control, or UAC, basically prevents ...

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta Now Available

As announced on Soma's blog, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta is available today. You can sign up to download the beta and receive more information about what was fixed. Shortly after you complete the survey to sign up you'll receive an email with a link to the download page where more information – including related KB articles &...

Enabling Large Patches to Install

As we prepare to ship a large minor upgrade known as Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, I'd like to again remind you that large files – not just Windows Installer packages – that must pass through a SAFER check may fail because enough contiguous memory cannot be allocated on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. I have posted a ...

Sign Up for Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta

Lots of people have been asking when Visual Studio 2005 SP1 beta will be released. No dates are released yet, but you can now sign up for the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta to be released on Microsoft Connect...

Making of a Service Pack

In response to a previous post about how large patches can cause problems, reader Zodman asks, "Would it be fair to say that SP1 is actually ready, and that the only hold up is problems with the install?"While I can't comment on any dates or availability, I can tell you we are working hard to provide the best possible customer experience to ...