Mailbag: How to install the Visual Studio 2008 SDK in silent mode

re: Mailbag: How to install the Visual Studio 2008 SDK in silent mode

GordonSchumacher — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:51:17 GMT

I don't suppose that there's a followup somewhere on how to do this for the Win7 PSDK? I tried following this, but it appears to install from a gazillion different MSIs, instead of just one...

re: Mailbag: How to install the Visual Studio 2008 SDK in silent mode

astebner — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:21:27 GMT

Hi GordonShumacher - I'm sorry, but I don't have any experience with the Windows 7 SDK, and it is still in pre-release form only (and only as an ISO file from what I can tell). Hopefully there will be some documentation for deployment and installation once the final version is released.

If it is anything like the Windows SDK components that are installed as a part of VS 2008, then you will likely need to deploy each of the individual MSIs for the SDK components that you require on your systems for your scenarios.

re: Mailbag: How to install the Visual Studio 2008 SDK in silent mode

dankegel — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 05:50:42 GMT

So, the Win 7 SDK is released, and is available

in web installer form at

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505

though the release notes do not document

how to deploy it (they just say run the

installer).

Sadly, running that with /x does unpack

a .cab, an .exe, and some .dll's, but no

.msi's, so something must be different.

It'd be sweet to know how to do an unattended

install. Maybe the answer will be to use

autohotkey, or to manually download the .msi's

logged by a manual install; I haven't tried

those routes yet, was hoping there was a simpler

one.

re: Mailbag: How to install the Visual Studio 2008 SDK in silent mode

dankegel — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:49:56 GMT

At first glance, it looks like you just

have to download all the files downloaded

by the installer (see the log), then

run msiexec /i on all the .msi's it downloaded.

Haven't checked to see if the resulting SDK

can really build things yet, though.

re: Mailbag: How to install the Visual Studio 2008 SDK in silent mode

astebner — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 03:25:44 GMT

Hi Dankegel - I didn't work on the Windows SDK setup team here at Microsoft, so my knowledge of how that installer works is somewhat limited. They have a web installer that doesn't contain any of the product payload and an ISO file that contains all of it.

As an experiment, I downloaded winsdk_web.exe from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c17ba869-9671-4330-a63e-1fd44e0e2505, then extracted it with the /x command line switch. Then I ran setup.exe /? and it shows a bunch of command line options, including the silent /q switch.

However, it appears that the silent mode doesn't try to download the payload it needs and instead just fails.

I think your best option here is going to be to download the ISO file from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=71deb800-c591-4f97-a900-bea146e4fae1 (unfortunately, it is huge), then run the setup in silent mode from there. It should work correctly since all of the payload is included in the ISO file.

I couldn't tell whether there was a way to install only a subset of the payload, but I think you're on the right track - you can try to run each of the MSI files for the features of the Windows SDK individually with standard Windows Installer command line parameters.

Hopefully this helps.