Doctor Deploys Blog

Do you own the deployment of your product and require the .NET Framework to be installed before you can install your application? If so, I want to hear from you.

I have a few general questions but any comments are welcome as long as they are constructive and actionable. My goal is to use this data to do what I can to improve the .NET Framework Redist experience in future versions.

Do you have a bootstrapper/chainer that preinstalls .NET? If so, which one (VSI, InstallShield, Wise, ClickOnce, custom)?
Do you block and point your user to the location to download and install .NET?
How large is your application?
How is your product deployed (Web download, CD, DVD, USB)?
What do you think about the size of the .NET package?
Do you know about the small package for .NET 3.5 that will download only what your user need? If so, do you use it?
What do you like about the .NET Framework Redist?
What do you dislike about the .NET Framework Redist?
Do you have any specific problems you can tell me about that you have had in deploying the .NET Framework?

Like I said, the info above will be helpful to me but I dont want to limit responses to these questions. We have a lot of data about the various issues people encounter while installing the .NET Framework but we dont have as much data about the ways people are deploying it and using it as part of their deployment. This is the type of info I’m looking to gather.

You can post as a comment or email me the info if you dont want it posted and seen by all.

Original post by Petermarcu

This post is a follow-up to Rob Mensching’s "Visual Studio ships the WiX toolset" blog entry.

One of the key tenets WiX development is operating under is to make all changes available to both community WiX as well as "Rosario" WiX. (They actually get fixed for the community first :))

Each time we make a major "Rosario" WiX release, I plan to list the major differences between community WiX and "Rosario" WiX.

Differences:

Signing - The WiX binaries shipped with Visual Studio will be signed with a Microsoft signature rather than the community WiX signature.
Contents of the installer - In order to limit our test surface and ship the mainline tools in the highest possible quality, there are a few tools that will not be shipping in the VS package. Another option we are exploring is to supply some sort of SDK for the tools we don’t plan to provide mainline support for.
Supported VS versions - The "Rosario" WiX toolset will only install on VS 2008 while the community version will continue to install on both VS 2005 and VS 2008.
Nant - No support for Nant will ship in the "Rosario" box.

Original post by Petermarcu

Currently, VS fails to launch after Vista build to build upgrades. A message box is displayed that says:
“The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect”
This is caused because the upgrade does not yet handle the migration of the C Runtime Components Side-by-side configuration files. There are two workarounds that I know of for this:

1. You can repair VS in its entirety
2. You can re-install the VC Runtime Components.

Just installing the VCRedist is by far faster than doing a full repair so it is the preferred workaround.

If someone knows where a public link to the VCRedist is, it would be helpful for to be able to point people to it from this post. Internally, feel free to contact me if you do not already know where to find it.

Original post by Petermarcu

There have been many problems recently with installation from the media that was handed out at the PDC and in various other places. One problem is caused by the disk label being burned incorrectly (VS install will fail). A second issue occurs during the installation of VSS (VSS install will fail). An error like this is shown:

“Error 1310.Error Writing to file: Microsoft.VisualStudio.SourceSafe.Interop.dll. Verify that you have access to that directory”

This happens when, for some reason, Windows Installer cannot write to the location where it tries to extract this file from its cab. Currently the best known work around for this issue, as well as disk label issue, is to copy the contents of the CD/DVD to the local hard disk and install directly from there.

Original post by Petermarcu

Although we went to great lengths to reduce the number of reboots required by setup, there were still a few that we could not avoid. You will notice that reboots are almost completely a thing of the past for installs but repair/maintenance mode is a different story.

When repairing Visual Studio Team Suite 2005 there is a chance that you could encounter up to 3 required reboots. These reboots are required by different components that are all chained into the repair. The number of reboots varies for the other VS SKU’s and also varies depending on what components were installed.

I know that dealing with all of these repairs is a bit of a hassle but I would like to try to eliminate any additional pain.

If you are asked for a reboot while repairing, ALWAYS choose “Reboot Now” instead of “Reboot Later”. If you choose to reboot later the installer will not startup automatically after the reboot. You will then need to launch maintenance mode manually after the reboot and the whole process will start over. If you choose to reboot now, the setup process will start up automatically after the reboot and will proceed to the next component in the repair.

Whenever you are going to repair a large product such as VS I recommend closing as many programs as possible since most reboots are caused by file in use situations. This is when another application you have running has a lock on a file that needs to be updated. I also recommend saving all of your work, and being prepared to reboot when asked.

Original post by Petermarcu