VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Jonathan Allen — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:51:00 GMT

I find your blog very, very hard to read. What font are you using, Pain Inducer Sans Serif? I am literally getting a headache trying to write this comment. (No, I am not exagerating.) Please find out who created this font and make them fix it. Jonathan Allen grauenwolf@fisbonds.com

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Heath Stewart — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 01:06:54 GMT

Jonathan, sorry about the headache. I recommend asperin and a trip to http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ClearType/tuner/Step1.aspx to use the online ClearType tuner. The font is Calibri, which is the Office 2007 default, followed by Verdana. It could be that your ClearType settings are optimal for display or aren't even turned on. In the former case, this can be a real eye sore. Running the tuner should help with that.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Jonathan Allen — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 01:33:25 GMT

Why should I use ClearType for the sake of one font? Especially when it makes all the other fonts look worse? Have you looked at that link you sent? The ClearType image is fuzzy. I don't want my fonts to be fuzzy, I want to to be crisp and clear like in the Black and White image. I even tried the tuner, and it didn't help nearly as much as turning it back off. Though that makes me ask why I should need to "tune" my screen in the first place when it looked just fine before. I have found that deleting the Calibri fonts from my computer have resolved the issue. However, I should not have needed to resort to that. Please forward my comments to the appropriate department. Jonathan Allen grauenwolf@gmail.com (sorry, the first email address was mis-typed)

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Heath Stewart — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 03:18:30 GMT

Jonathan, the point of the ClearType tuner is to "unfuz". The initial images are examples of both good and bad ClearType, but are only images. Steps 2 and 3, IIRC, are where you pick the best looking (i.e., most crisp) display to tune ClearType for your display.

With ClearType turned off, the fonts may appear a little jagged but shouldn't look to bad.

To determine if you have ClearType on or not, right-click on your Desktop, choose Properties, click the Appearance tab, then click the Effects button. To enable ClearType or anti-aliasing ("Standard") is the second option.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Javier Lozano — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 06:23:31 GMT

The font used looks ok to me with and without ClearType on.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Norman Diamond — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 06:06:48 GMT

In general I like ClearType even though it only really worked on fonts that are primarily Italian characters. (Or maybe other small alphabets such as Cyrillic and Greek too; I didn't try them.) On fonts such as MS Gothic it works on sizes larger than something around 18, which of course isn't practical for most controls where the standard size is 9. Anyway, I like ClearType when it works ... but that's just me. Recently I've read complaints by others where certain kinds of monitors or maybe certain kinds of eyes don't handle the appearance of ClearType the way the majority do. Just as some Microsoft products have options to allow left-handed operation or high contrast displays, it's pretty understandable why Microsoft products should have options to turn off ClearType. I'm not sure yet what to think about ClearType in Meiryo. The font is fatter than MS UI Gothic so less information fits on the screen. The effect of smoothing isn't what it should be. But someone seems to have found a workaround for that: http://drwatson.nobody.jp/gdi++/index.html Whether or not you can read the text, look at the image containing screenshots of two displays of text. Meanwhile I thought the font in this blog looked like Verdana.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Heath Stewart — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 21:56:19 GMT

Norman, thanks for commenting. ClearType can be turned off or on for the entire OS (you can also opt to use anti-aliases, or have both off). IE7 even lets turn ClearType off for font rendering in IE. I'm not sure how independent of Windows' setting this is.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Norman Diamond — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 04:25:22 GMT

> ClearType can be turned off or on for the > entire OS Welcome to the difference between theory and fact. The Windows Control Panel provides an option to turn it on or off for the entire OS. Parts of Windows (e.g. Internet Explorer) and applications (e.g. Microsoft Office) have been reported not to obey the option. One example doesn't count because Vista is still a release candidate. Windows Control Panel options for fonts partly do and partly don't obey the ClearType setting. Screenshot: http://www.geocities.jp/hitotsubishi/5728-001.png

Installing VS 2005 SP1 Beta on Vista RC1

ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:52:08 GMT

Installing Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Betaon Vista RC1 sounds like a common task until you figure out the

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Fduch — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 02:51:05 GMT

Patch installation scenario as I saw it:

1) Unpack to %temp%\SOMENAME

2) Copy to %temp% {Why??}

3) Copy to %windows%\Installer {Again? Ok}

4) unpack to %windows%\Installer\PatchCache

The worst package I saw was DirectX SDK:

1) There is HUGE zip

2) Inside there is HUGE exe

3) Exe unpacks CABs

4) CABs install ZIPs

5) in ZIPs there are samples.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Phaeron — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 06:56:43 GMT

This behavior is hideously inefficient and optimizes for the wrong case. Why would I want to constantly double or triple the installation footprint in order to optimize patching/repair, which I only do when new Visual Studio service packs come out, i.e. every couple of years. I wouldn't mind pulling out installation media for this rare case if it meant Visual Studio didn't take five times what Setup says after I install three service packs to it.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Heath Stewart — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 09:18:51 GMT

Fduch, as described in this post Windows Installer controls writing to %TEMP% and %WINDIR%\Installer. This is for UI and the actual installation, respectively. The location in %TEMP% is temporary and is created in %TEMP% for security and LUA purposes (normal users can't write to %WINDIR%\Installer). Because both msiexec.exe and MsiInstallProduct() require the path to a file, our wrapper has to extract the file. Windows Installer does not use this path and will copy to %TEMP% anyway. This file we extract will also be removed after installation completes (or an error occurs).

You can avoid the copy in %TEMP% by running silently as described above.

Phaeron, Windows Installer caches the patch for several reasons. In the case of VS, if you were to install and later remove a hotfix that targeted SP1, those source files for SP1 would be required and those are found in the SP1 patch. Thus, it is required to get the SP1 files to replace back onto your disk.

The $PatchCache$ location is meant for binary deltas which we currently cannot use for VS, and you can disable that during SP1 install using the MaxPatchCacheSize policy also described in the post.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Frank Zehlius — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 12:32:40 GMT

What about the config.msi directory?

My Temp dir is on a different drive where there is enough space.

But the installer creates a directory c:\config.msi and thats why it needs double the

amound during installation on my sysdrive.

Why isn't this directory below %temp%?

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Phaeron — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 22:00:49 GMT

Okay, but again, this is optimizing for the exceptional case. Hotfixes are temporary fixes that are only supposed to be installed on afflicted systems, so they should hopefully be rare. What Installer should be doing is what RCS systems do, which is to backup only the updated files. The user should also have the option not to save uninstall information.

Given this existing behavior, is it at least possible to slipstream the patch onto installation media so new installations don't have this overhead?

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Heath Stewart — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 08:33:08 GMT

Frank, the C:\Config.msi directory (on the system drive) is for temporary copies of files (rollback files) in case an error occurs. These are the files being overwritten.

Frank and Phaeron, these copies of files are controlled and created by Windows Installer and there is no setting to turn them off - besides the baseline cache copy using the MaxPatchCacheSize.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Digby — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 08:40:34 GMT

Sp consumes a lot of disk space (2 - 3 times the original footprint) and takes longer to install than the original. Forgive me for saying this - but when does it become Bloatware ?

Why not just release a new VS - VS 2006? with the SP included.

digby

Re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Jean Chevalier — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 16:44:37 GMT

VS-SP1 didn't clear my personal Temp folder after install.

It left a 360MB folder on

C:\Documents and Settings\<me>\Local Settings\Temp

(which I had to delete manually)

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Glen H — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 05:12:34 GMT

When is Microsoft going to just give up and admit that the registry and Windows Installer were both monumentally bad ideas? The boom of U3 applications is proof enough of what users actually want simple xcopy style deployment. The current state of affairs has gone beyond ludicrous. Over a gigabyte of wasted disk space to upgrade 300MB of files? Thats just plain stupid. Image the alternative Microsoft says, From now on, to achieve Windows certification, all applications must be completely self-contained within their own folder structure. Application settings must all be stored in xml format and may (optionally) be stored in a separate 'Settings' folder on a per-user basis. No application is allowed to change or install ANYTHING in the Windows folder EVER.

The result would be pure nirvana Want to upgrade your OS or configure a new machine? Just install the OS and xcopy all your current apps (and their settings) files to the new machine. It would take maybe an hour to completely build a new machine and have all your preferences and settings intact, vs. the days, or sometimes weeks that it takes today. You like my settings? Here, have a copy of my settings file. That latest patch causing problems? Put in the original source disk, copy-paste-done. Want to try the latest beta? Copy-Paste-Done. Want to uninstall the beta? Delete parent folder, insert original source, Copy-Paste-Done.

Can you not see how insane it is to waste multi-gigabytes of space to implement the current scenario, all in the name of saving a few megabytes of space by sharing a few dlls? Virtually every IT person in the world hates you for the current system.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

BitBasher — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:24:58 GMT

I don't think there's any polite way to say that this method of installing a service pack is flawed and unacceptable. This IS bloatware-to-the-max.

I find it amusing that the huge mega process involved in installing the SP is being touted by MS as a cool new feature. I bet the VS2005 SP could easily be installed by something like the NullSoft installer (aka lightweight, non-bloatware), but I bet NIH is the MS mantra.

If you ever want to find out where loads of drive space is going, review your Windows\installer folder. I've found GIGABYTES of wasted space in that folder from software that has long since been uninstalled, but the MSI installer tends to not want to delete all the bloatware files (even after full uninstalls).

If you step back and look at all the blog entries about VS2005 SP1 issues, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that THIS current method of installing a service pack in fundamentally flawed.

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Mike — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 06:59:09 GMT

Is there a way to create a SlipStream version where I extract the bits from the DVD's and update Visual Studio with the patch similar to creating a Windows SlipStream disk?

re: VS 2005 SP1 Requires a lot of Disk Space

Heath Stewart — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 07:36:05 GMT

Mike, search my blog and msdn.microsoft.com for "administrative installation". While you can't easily reproduce the DVD image exactly, you can create essetially an "unzipped" installation package, then patch it. This is accomplished by bascally doing the following:

msiexec /a vs_setup.msi TARGETDIR=<path> /L*v <log1>

msiexec /a <path>\vs_setup.msi /p <patch.msp> /L*v <log2>

This will be a very large image, though - just small enough to fit on DVDs.

If you already have VS installed, you can run the following with the updated image (after following the basic steps above):

msiexec /fvomus <path>\vs_setup.msi /L*v <log3>

It's important to pass "v" in order to recache the package. Since this is a reinstalled package you will not be able to remove the SP this way, nor by installing the package fresh. The SP is "baked" in, as slipstreams go.

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