Installing VS2005 or VS2008 redistributable files on Windows Embedded Standard 2009

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There have been several forum posts about including the redistributable files for Visual studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 in a runtime image so that applications built using these versions can run. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 database does not have componentized versions of the redistributable files for these versions of VS. The easiest way is to include the redist files as part of the application during development. If you are not the developer of the application then there are a few options.

  • You could create a new component with an FBA Generic Command that calls the redistributable package installer during FBA. You should set the FBA phase to between 8500 and 12,000 so that it runs later in the FBA sequence. If the redist package supports a quiet flag, and a silent install is desired, specify the appropriate switches in the Arguments property of the FBA Generic Command, such as

“%11%\cmd.exe” for FilePath and

“/c <path> \vcredist_x86.exe /q” for Arguments property.

  • Calling the redist executable directly will fail. You could just as easily do a RunOnce command in a new component, but an FBA Generic Command provides more control over the order that this command will run, especially if you have other components that are also doing custom actions during FBA.
  • You could also componentize the redist installer, which requires breaking the setup apart into the associated files and registry data and creating a component containing those resources.