Folks,
I am creating an installer project in Visual Studio. This is done using a project of type "Setup and Deployment".
I lay out the file structure of my final install in the "File System" View of the project.
Now, some of the files I create as part of my install are updated while my application is used. I would like these files to not be removed during an uninstall of my application. Is there any way in Visual Studio to designate a file as "protected from uninstall"?
Thanks for your help.
In the Solution Explorer window, in the Setup project, click the file. Then in the Properties window, set the Permanent property to True.
I'm not sure how to do it in the installer, but any file that you create from the application will be preserved in the event of an uninstall.
If you can stand it, maybe you could create these files as a first-time initialization in your application.
Of course, this can lead to other problems (permissions to create a file), but it might be easier than fighting with the cryptic installer setup.
Related
We're working in quite a large project and is having a hard time getting people to configure their Visual Studio correct (tabs instead of spaces etc.). We found a great solution in using the EditorConfig extension for Visual Studio.
However there are still some developers that seems to ignore our request to install this extension to their Visual Studio and hence I'm wondering if there is any way to force an extension to be installed before a solution can be opened, maybe some setting in the .sln file?
No there is no such option built-in. If your machines are domain joined, you could push out the installer through System Center or domain logon scripts.
You could cheat and create a solution level pre-build step. Create a target file named: before.{solutionname.sln}.targets and store it next to your solution file. Check it into source control. In the targets file you can use standard MsBuild to see if the extension is installed (you'll need to check the file system probably) and if not present force the installation by calling vsixinstaller.exe to trigger the install.
I tried to create a MSI installer for a simple windows project with basic set up. When I ran the built msi file it is not installing anything in the target location neither creating a desktop icon. Though I can find an entry in control panel. I am using VS 2013, not able to understand why it is not creating anything.
Thanks for help.
You should say what you actually did. It won't install anything to the target system unless you put files (or project output) in the Application Folder in the setup project, and it won't create a desktop shortcut unless you right-click the executable in the Application Folder view, create shortcut, then drag and drop the shortcut to the Desktop folder, again this is in the setup project's File System view.
Start here, old but still they way they work:
https://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/visual-studio/getting-started-with-setup-projects/
I create a new custom project type using a VSPackage project inheriting of MPF library (http://mpfproj11.codeplex.com/). As a result I obtain a .vsix but I need add this project type using a .msi. I'm using the Visual Studio 2010 Setup projet for it. In my setup project I add the content of the VS Package in the same directory where the .vsix put then, but I think Ineed to put in the registre the new type of project because when I use the setup , the project template does not come out in Visual Studio and when I give double click the file with extension of the type of new project and does not recognize it. When I look the registry after install the vsix, this was one of the things that I found diferent. I add this entries in my setup project but It's not working yet.I'm missing something else?
In the projecttemplatedir is the directory where I put the .dll of the project type, the vsixmifest and pkgdef. The project template is in [User]\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Templates\ProjectTemplates\[Name of new Project Type]\[projecttemplate.zip]
Best Regards
PS: The project type is for VS 2013 but I'm using the VS 2010 Setup project ;)
OK, so first the "don't"s of doing this:
In general, if you are installing via MSI you shouldn't be doing anything user-specific -- no writing in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, nor writing within their Documents folder, LocalAppData, or Visual Studio folders, etc. If you see yourself writing files or registry keys in either of those places, that should be your hint that there's a better way to do what you're trying to do. For what you've shown so far, this raises more than a few red flags for me.
Second, don't ever go writing keys into 12.0_Config. That part of the hive is nothing more than a cache that's built up from other parts of the registry and on-disk .pkgdef files from extensions. It's rebuilt in any number of senarios, including installing new extensions. Any writes there you should presume will get blown away at any time. If you need to write things there you should either (a) write in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\[version] and run devenv /setup or (2) [preferred] put your keys in a .pkgdef inside your extension which gets merged into 12.0_Config for you automatically.
Now the dos:
You said you already had a .vsix produced by the SDK: you can put project templates in there. You can then register those templates in the .vsixmanifest and those will pull in. That's far easier than mucking around with files in Documents -- that's the user's directory...don't go playing with that.
Once you have a .vsix that does most of what you need, you should simply take the files within that and install the files in a folder within C:\Program Files [(x86)]\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions. Even better, you might just want to WiX toolset to build your installer, since it has built-in support for installing extensions. It also has built-in support for invoking the "/setup" process if that's what you need to do as well. Visual Studio Setup projects are no longer supported in newer versions of Visual Studio, so you're better off starting with a technology that isn't already obsolete. WiX is even what we use at Microsoft to do the setup work for Visual Studio itself, so it's definitely up to the task.
Last point: almost everything when it comes to Visual Studio extensibility can be done with a VSIX directly, so presume there's a good way to do something that way before falling back to an MSI. Internally, we can register the entire C# and VB language services with just a VSIX -- they're quite powerful.
I found the answer in this link Registering Project and Item Templates. I set projecttemplatedir entry with
[User]\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Templates\ProjectTemplates[Name of new Project Type][projecttemplate.zip] that is where i put the project template.
I've created a VS2010 extension to manage a new type of project. I've created the VSIX file with the project and item templates inside, and everything works fine, i'm able to create a new project, syntax highlight, compile it, etc.
What i want to do now is to associate my files (.stadyn) to the VS2010, like a .cs file. I mean, give it an icon and open the VS2010 on a double-click.
Does anybody know how to deploy the extension and add those keys to windows registry?
Thanks in advance.
You have to possibilities.
Create an installer for your extension which is doing all the stuff.
Add the file associations when the extensions first starts.
I would prefer option one, since then you can also uninstall your extension and unregister the file associations and may be do other cleanup stuff. Also you could do other stuff during the install.
Edit:
Deployment is documented in the MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff363239.aspx
I'm working on my first project in Visual Studio and I haven't used Windows much since '05, so please bear with me.
I've got my project open in Visual Studio 2008, and I'm trying to open a particular file for editing, but I get an error that says
"c:\path\to\file
Cannot open file.
I've verified that the file exists, and I can open it from Windows Explorer, but nothing from inside Visual Studio, any ideas?
I'm not familiar with Visual Studio, so my terminology might be incorrect.
The file appears in the tree in the Visual Studio Explorer pane, so I double clicked it, and got the error. The error said nothing more than the file path: Cannot open file.
How can I check permissions/ACLs in Windows? I assumed that since I could open it in Windows Explorer, I would be able to open it in Visual Studio.
And it's a .cpp file.
You may want to right-click on the file in the tree, and delete it from the project.
Then, add back an existing item.
Hopefully that will fix the problem.
Though I'm not familiar with this specifically, if you just want to move forward, I'd recommend creating a new project type and just adding all the existing files to it. Should be quicker and easier than diagnosing what could be many issues.
Other things to check: encoding type of the project file, permissions/ACLs (can you open that actual file from an unelevated VS prompt, for instance), etc.
Additionnaly to the other answers, I found out that this problem may arrise if the target .Net framework version specified in the project file isn't installed.
This seems to prevent visual studio from opening all the files contained in the project, and showing the "Unable to open file " message.
Correcting the version (in the csproj file or in the settings), saving and reloading the project fixes the problem.
I had same problem, my project were build on (.Net 4.5), which I uninstalled on my PC and replaced by (.Net 4.8), so just replacing project's target framework to the one which is installed "in my case (.Net 4.8)" should fix it.