Now that WiX v3.6 has been released , I introduce the managed bootstrapper application (MBA) interoperability layer. It’s been available for a while actually, and if you’ve installed any builds of WiX v3.6, or the Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0 Developer...

If you are installing Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 from across the network and are experiencing slow install times, this could be caused by low network bandwidth and long verification times. How to work around this issue For...

After installing Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, some users were unable to use the x64 or IA64 compilers from the Windows SDK 7.1. Now the Visual C++ team has released an update for VS2010 SP1 available here . For more information about the update...

While we recommend installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 using the web download – which only downloads and install those packages needed on your machine – you can also download an ISO for offline use. If you downloaded the ISO for VS2010 SP1 from the Microsoft...

Now that Visual Studio 2010 SP1 has been released , administrators and developers may wish to install both RTM and SP1 together for a seamless experience. With the release of VS2010 RTM we already published the Visual Studio Administrator Guide that documents...

Some users are reporting that when installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 they are prompted for MSI files as shown in the following example screenshot. These prompts for source are most common during rollback on failed install attempts and uninstall since...

As announced in Soma’s blog post , Visual Studio 2010 SP1 has been released to MSDN subscribers today and will release to the general public on Thursday, March 10th. We have made a number of significant changes in Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from past releases...

On average customers are experience ~45 minute installs for Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Based on machine performance, even seeing install times of a little over an hour isn’t unexpected. But if VS2010 SP1 is taking more than a couple hours to install, there...

Often I’m asked why installing a Windows Installer patch (MSP) takes as long or longer to install than the target product (MSI). While this isn’t always the case for every patch, it’s certainly possible for a number of reasons. It may also come as a surprise...

By installing Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta now (or tomorrow for general availability ), you have a great opportunity to provide early feedback before we ship VS2010 SP1 RTM. Not only do we welcome feedback on the updates to the product such as the new...

If you haven’t seen from Soma’s or Jason’s blog, Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Beta is available today for MSDN Subscribers and will be available on Thursday for the general public. This service pack contains a lot of performance improvements and a new Help...

For a few years my primary development machine has actually been a VM with source located on a physical hard drive attached to the VM. This helps reduce latency compared to a differencing disk (AVHD) which may need to expand to accommodate additional...

WiX 3.5 provides features to integrate with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010. But like many add-ins, since new files are being added they certainly can’t be in use by devenv.exe. So when we call devenv.exe /setup as part of our install, the changes...

Shared components define shared resources. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to understand that whatever you do to a shared resource during the installation of one product affects those same resources for any other product. For example, when upgrading...

The Windows Installer SDK ships a library named patchwiz.dll . This contains the logic to build a patch from pairs of database packages ( .msi files, or simply MSIs) along with other configuration properties. Another tool that the SDK ships is msimsp...