Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 can take a long time to install and may apply to multiple products on your machine, appearing to install multiple times. This is a large service pack and installs a lot of files, fixing many issues and adding several...

A common problem with installations is user-editable files and registry keys. Configuration of this nature is a problem for every installer technology, but here are some guidelines to help developers overcome problems like users' preferences being reset...

Before installing the release of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 , you must uninstall the Service Pack 1 Beta . If you do not uninstall the beta first, you will receive the following message localized appropriately for Windows, "The upgrade patch...

Now that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is released, it can be detected programmatically in various ways. Registry detection is recommended for ease and is less impacted by future changes to the product installation. Because there are many different...

Now that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 is released, some are wondering how to slipstream the patch so they can install Visual Studio 2005 with SP1 already applied. Much of this process is standard practice for Windows Installer packages. Please...

There are a number of guidelines to prevent requiring source media for patch installation . These guidelines can also help prevent requiring source media during patch uninstall, but there are a number of caveats. Recall from Rebuilding the Installer...

Some have noticed that the msiexec.exe process seems to run for quite some time after a known installation completing, or that the Windows Installer service starts and stops even though it is set to manual startup mode. These are often the same process...