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...

While we hope you’ll love Visual Studio 2010 for all the application development it enables with powerful features and a robust extension model that enables great extensions like the Productivity Power Tools , if you ever need to uninstall Visual Studio...

After installing the last several releases of Visual Studio, you’ll find shortcuts to command prompts that automatically set up the PATH, INCLUDE, LIB, and other environment variables. At least with Visual Studio 2010 these command prompts have larger...

Now that Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 have been released, developers may wonder how to detect them on the system. As with previous releases, we support registry detection of either product family and Windows Installer component...

Major upgrades are Windows Installer products that can be installed like any other product with the added benefit of removing one ore more related products. For example, version 2 of a product can be installed on a clean machine, or on a machine with...

A while back I explained how Windows Installer sets the TARGETDIR property to the root of the fixed drive with the most free space available. The problem is that even an attached USB external drive can appear as a fixed drive, and these may be later detached...

When testing the serviceability of your product before you ship, it’s important to test any conditions you might have on the product, features, components, and actions. Feature conditions can set the install level of a feature when the package is installed...

It’s always important to test your product before it ships. Servicing it later can prove very costly and very difficult. It’s no different with your installation packages. You need to test not only basic install and uninstall operations, but also test...

After the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) is installed, there is a button to install the documentation locally. If you have overlooked this option or chose not to install documentation locally and wish to do so later, you can follow these instructions...

If you have downloaded the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate (RC) from MSDN or the Download Center as an ISO and are having problems installing it, it could be that either the ISO wasn’t downloaded correctly or that it wasn’t burnt to DVD correctly...

Announced yesterday for MSDN subscribers , the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidates are available today for everyone to download . Feedback on VS2010 RC has been great, and we hope you agree. Feel free to provide feedback...

Components are the basic unit of installation in a Windows Installer product. They are installed by one or more features, and can contain any number of resources including files, assemblies, registry values, and are recommended for custom resources as...

Installation bootstrap applications are increasingly common as products chain dependencies like the Microsoft .NET Framework. Because 64-bit Windows supports both 32- and 64-bit execution , but 64-bit executables on 32-bit Windows give what some users...

As announced on Soma’s blog this morning, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 have been released to MSDN Subscribers and will be available for everyone on Wednesday. Visual Studio 2010 boasts a great new user interface...