October, 2006

Language support in Windows Installer can be confusing until you understand how Windows Installer queries for and uses languages. Some wonder why Windows Installer packages have two different places to set the language. Some wonder why, for example, localized...

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...

In The NoImpersonate Bit Mistake , Robert Flaming of the Windows Installer team discusses how some custom actions may fail because they impersonate the non-privileged client token and won't be able to perform some actions. Such a scenario is described...

Effective immediately, I am changing comment options on this blog to only allow comments for posts made within the last 60 days. Like Sara and most – if not all – other bloggers on this site, I get a lot of comment spam and it takes too much time to wade...

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...

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...

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...

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...