Some customers are reporting that Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is failing to install with the following error in the HTML log you can view from the error dialog. Patch (C:\Users\heaths\AppData\Local\TEMP\WebDesignerCore_KB950278.msp) install failed...

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...

How to detect certain patches applied to .NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005....

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...

Designing and developing applications for the global economy can often be difficult, but the .NET Framework made globalization and localization much more simple. In Visual Studio 2005 resources are handled a little bit differently, providing you - the...

How to suppress console windows for EXE custom actions....

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...

A common question is how to create a Windows Installer package that installs 32-bit binaries on 32-bit platforms, and both 32- and 64-bit binaries on 64-bit platforms. If you're actually trying to install 64-bit binaries to appropriate directories and...

A recent project I worked on was to replace functionality for part of our patching process that runs commands after reboot, a task not too uncommon for installers - most notably because files were in use when the installers ran. Typically when files are...

How to diagnose errors when installing, repairing or patching, or uninstalling a product using Windows Installer technology....

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...

Surely by now you've seen the news on the Blogs.msdn.com homepage that both .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 (both also known as "Whidbey Beta 2") have been released , so I won't mention it. ;) I do want to share, however, after...

When I announced that Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM will install over SP1 beta , we were on track to make that reality. However, when SP1 beta shipped we found that adding new components into existing features was causing a prompt for source for non-default...

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...

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...

Symptom Customers installing Visual Studio 2012 RTM on pre-release versions of Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 may see the following error after launching the setup application: The .Net Framework installed on this machine does not meet the...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Beta) has been released to web , along with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (Beta). Included as part of .NET 3.5 SP1 are Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 (Beta) and Microsoft .NET Framework...

How to package up Paint.NET in a tiny, easy-to-distribute, self-extracting executable....

How to wait for a previous install session to finish instead of failing a concurrent install....

Testing software can be fun and rewarding. You get to see new, upcoming features and provide valuable feedback to the developer. But as with most pre-release software, we recommend that you don’t install it on production machines. You could dedicate extra...

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...

As we prepare to ship a large minor upgrade known as Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 , I'd like to again remind you that large files – not just Windows Installer packages – that must pass through a SAFER check may fail because enough contiguous memory...

How to fix administrative deployment for ia64 and x64 .NET Framework redistributables using a transform....

After installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 , adding or removing features from Visual Studio may prompt for the file SQLSysClrTypes.msi with the following text: Setup is looking for file SQLSysClrTypes.msi. Please insert Microsoft Visual Studio...