How to report an installation or setup problem with VS2008 beta or .NET Framework 3.5 beta

bretgrinslade — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 18:33:00 GMT

My team owns the installation experience for Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5. One difficulty in the setup and deployment space is that the real world is a lot more complicated and messy than we can re-create in the test lab.

That is where you can help.

If you have run VS2008 or NETFX 3.5 setup and have had a problem, you can send your setup logs to our team. Aaron has a good post on "understanding the setup logs." We don’t promise to know what the fix is for your issue, but we will try to come up with a work around and to identify the problem. We add the work-arounds to our blogs and to the online readme.

To make this easy, we have created a Hotmail mailbox you can mail your logs to:

vs2008deployment@hotmail.com

And we have posted a tool you can use to collect the logs.

VS and NETFX Setup Log Collection Tool

So, if you are seeing a setup problem. You can go the forums to post a question. You can review Aaron Stebner's blog and review the readme to see if this is a know issue. Here are some of the recent issues Aaron has documented.

If you are still stuck, this is probably not a known issue. In that case, please send us your logs.

BTW, we do allow you to send logs via the check box that sends feedback to Microsoft. However, the way we have implemented that on Vista, they don’t get uploaded immediately and they take 30 days before Vista prompts you to allow them to be uploaded. So, logs from Vista are especially appreciated!

Pre-Release software blocking Visual Studio Beta2 installation

bretgrinslade — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 22:38:00 GMT

The setup for VS Orcas and the .NET Framework 3.5 has a list of pre-release installations that must be removed before installing. When you uninstall beta1 or a CTP, it should removed the components that would block; however in some cases you had more than one product installed or there was some issue or problem on uninstall.

You might see an error message like this -- "These pre-release products might include, but are not limited to, the following: - MDSN Library for Visual Studio Orcas - ENU".

You can look in Add/Remove programs or Programs and Features on Vista and above to remove any of the Orcas pre-release software (most likely beta1).

If you don’t see any, you can use this tool that Aaron Stebner has posted called msiinv.exe which will enumerate your installed programs.

Msiinv.exe tool or http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/07/01/434814.aspx

If it still doesn’t install after removing all of the VS Orcas or VS 2008 bits from the output of msiinv.exe, you might have a different issue.

Software & Services Bret Grinslade : vs orcas

How to report an installation or setup problem with VS2008 beta or .NET Framework 3.5 beta

Pre-Release software blocking Visual Studio Beta2 installation