There is no option to install the Visual Basic language when choosing "custom" install of Visual Studio 2015. I really need to do a custom install, but I also really need Visual Basic!
What a ridiculous fail by Microsoft, unless I'm missing something obvious here?
"A Custom installation automatically includes the components that are in a Default installation."
So as per following, C# and VB always get installed.
MSDN Guide on Installing VS 2015
You misinterpret what you see, support for VB.NET and C# is always installed. There is no option to not install them.
Not 100% sure why they are not optional but high odds that if it were then the diskspace savings would not be substantial enough. Lots of the plumbing is already provided by the .NET Framework and MSBuild, they always need to be installed since VS itself depends on them. The only thing that could be skipped are the language services and the project templates, saves but a few handful of megabytes.
Trying to channel why you would ask such a question and not simply let it rip, if you discover that after installation you do not have VB.NET support then the install did not go well. That's a pretty common problem, almost always caused by having a beta or trial version installed previously and not uninstalling it correctly. That is a difficult problem to recover from, there is a lot of junk in the registry that should be reset/deleted. The usual way to recover is to run the original installer from the command-line with the /uninstall /force options.
Related
I am using Microsoft Visual Studio Installer projects extension to create an installer for my app.
Works OK, but the problem is that the product name contains "ลก" character in it and the font used in the msi installer obviously doesn't support that character:
Anything I can do about that?
Some background info:
I initially developed the app in VS 2015 which had a free Install Shield Limited edition. Or maybe it was even VS2013, don't really remember... However, now I need to make some changes in the app. There was no problem with such a name in Install Shield back then. So I tried to open the project in VS 2022, but obviously Install shield's no longer an option. This is where VS Installer project comes in, but there's the problem with the diacritics...
This looks like an encoding issue. Try searching in the VS project properties for an option to set the encoding to Unicode. I don't use the VS projects that much, so I don't know if you have the option to change it not, but it might be there.
Also, if you are looking for a better free MSI packaging tool, try the Advanced Installer extension for Visual Studio. There is one for each version of VS.
Disclaimer. I work on the team building Advanced Installer.
I have Visual Studio Ultimate/Enterprise installed from a previous engagement. I've now started at a new place who only have licenses form VS Professional. So I need to downgrade but the supported route involves full uninstall and full reinstall which is obviously rather time consuming.
Are there any "clever" (probably unsupported) ways to do the downgrade?
It is not possible to downgrade an installation, as they are different products and can exist side by side. The components downloaded and installed for each product are different.
If you had previously installed VS Pro, as I had, you might be able to go to "Add/Remove Programs" and select "Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise with Updates." Modify->Uninstall worked perfectly for me. Be sure to backup any settings, as some of mine got reset. My extensions stayed the same, though. To be clear, I had VS Pro first, and I installed Enterprise Evaluation side-by-side with it.
I'm in a similar situation, unfortunately there's no supported option besides the uninstall/reinstall route you've already mentioned. You could probably save some time by backing up all your extensions and settings etc. The processes outlined below might be different for more recent versions but I think the process would be similar
Backup and restore settings
Backup and restore extensions
Edit:
This is pretty weird, I'm starting to think that perhaps Drunken Code Monkey's solution is more accurate than I initially thought. I was expecting to have to follow the same process as Schneider described (uninstall / full reinstall), but as soon as the uninstall of VS Enterprise finished, I was able to open VS Pro as normal.
Edit 2:
Turns out it was not as normal, a bunch of things didn't work (creating ASP.NET MVC projects) and I had to do a repair. Not quite as bad as a full reinstall, fortunately.
Just had to do this. You must first uninstall the enterprise edition. Visual Stuido Installer will complete the uninstall and when it's finished will prompt if you'd like to install a different version, such as Community.
Down Grade visual studio from enterprise to Professional
we can download separate professional version of Visual studio EXE.
Professional and enterprise run side by side in our machine but need separate 2 license for those 2.
if you want to downgrade you visual studio from Enterprise to professional just need to install EXe using below link
https://my.visualstudio.com/downloads?pid=2234.
I think I'll soon will regret the day I chose to use InstallShield and not WiX.
I had a bit of experience with WiX, and it seemed a bit complicated to use, so when the time came for a real project, I chose to use the new Flexera InstallShield LE for Visual Studio 2010.
At first it seemed so easy, I created and compiled the first installation project without any issues. It even managed to extract COM information from some 3rd party library (which was compiled using VC 6, as far as I know).
But when I added some more InstallShield installation (ISL) projects to the same solution, strange problems appeared. If I edit the General information page of one ISL project and then click Save All button, suddenly the information gets messed up with parts from other ISL projects, some fields show up as UNITITIALIZED STRING, and some fields just mix up. And when I open the other ISL projects, I see, that the info is messed up there, too. The only solution seems to be to unload all other ISL projects while editing the General information page.
The problem number two: crashes. My project is a mixed C++/C# application. Sometimes while editing unmanaged C++ code, Visual Studio just crashes on some certain operations (like commenting out some blocks of code, cutting, pasting). I even installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, but that did not help. The crashes completely stopped occurring when I unloaded all ISL projects.
Anyway, I am frustrated and now I have a choice:
stay with ISL, create my own executable which will get installed and will run regsvr32. Still I'll have to live with Visual Studio crashes and General Information page problems.
move to Windows Installer XML. But I am not sure at what stage it is now, won't I have the same problems? Can WiX register COMs for me (also can it register 32 bit dlls on 64 bit systems using regsvr32 from syswow64 folder)? Is it stable with Visual Studio 2010?
I will really appreciate your suggestions about what should I do - stay with ISL or move to WiX, especially from those who are experienced WiX users on Visual Studio 2010.
I would highly recommend migrating your setup installers to use Windows Installer XML (WiX).
I did this years ago and have never looked back. :)
Wix v3.5 is very stable.
I haven't had any problems with its integration with Visual Studio, among a lot of its other features.
It's open source and the community is very helpful.
You can use heat.exe to extract COM information from a file.
http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/heat.htm
You can call regsvr32.exe for example on the target machine using the built-in Quiet Execution CustomAction
http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/qtexec.htm
That link also documents how to run 64-bit executables.
You can use the [SystemFolder] property to execute a file in c:\windows\syswow64 for example.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372055.aspx
WiX's DTF technology is perfect for writing msi custom actions in c#.
HTH.
The purpose is to have a USB flash to have a developer seat everywhere. The idea is to use application virtualization to package Visual Studio.
However, AFAIK, there are big problems.
Have anyone succeeded in packaging Visual Studio (2010, 2008) using ThinApp, App-V, ...
P.S. I'm aware of google.
This is not possible. There's nothing "thin" about Visual Studio, it has an enormous mass of files in many different directories and a very large number of critical registry entries. Including many COM components. That it works as well as it does is one of the modern day's Seven World Wonders of software engineering.
Your license allows you to install VS on more than one machine as long as only one user uses it. I recommend you take advantage of it.
It is possible to install Visual Studio 2013 in App-V, it takes a lot of time to load and takes about 3Gb in .dat file. Compiling and debugging in C++ tested and works but really slow. No errors or popups for missing components so far. After experimenting I made a final virtualization script that works. p.m me.
It is possible to make Visual Studio portable version using VMWare Thinapp. No installation will be needed for Visual Studio, .net Framework or any other dependency. It works with Visual Studio Express edition 2008 as I have experimented but for version 2010, it say "Invalid Licence Data. Reinstall...". If you find a way, please tell me!
Basically what the title says. I am looking to install the Visual Studio 2010 Beta for compiling personal C++ projects. I haven't made it through the tutorial for setting things up, but do I need the Server part of the program if I don't plan on doing any team projects?
Thanks.
Edit: Well it looks like I can't install the Team Foundation Server anyways without downloading a bunch of other crap. Will the rest of it install without it?
Team Foundation Server is for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking. To connect to the server you need the Team Explorer extension installed on your Visual Studio and get a client access license.
I guess you don't need to connect to a server to develop personal projects. For a comparison of Visual C++ 2010 editions, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hs24szh9(VS.100).aspx.
You don't need TFS 2010 for your personal projects.
1) No, you don't need it.
Unless you really want all the TFS features, you'll be installing masses of stuff for no real gain. Having said that, if you want to use source control, profiling, code analysis and those sort of handy things, it would be one way to achieve this - though you'd probably still be better off with a couple of specific third party tools than the whole TFS install if you only want a few of these tools.
2) No, you don't need to install all the bits to make it work.
Unless something has changed a lot with 2010, the basic VSTS install is more or less the same as the Pro version of VS - and then you install the Team Explorer on top to gain the TFS specific client-side extensions.
In fact, you can go much further by doing a custom install and turning off a lot of stuff that you don't want (VS includes a load of stuff for targetting platforms you will probably never see with languages you may not have even heard of :-). That said, unless disk space is a major concern, it's easier and safer to just go for a standard install, because that is always going to be the best tested configuration - once you start removing bits there is a tendency for odd little things to stop working properly.