Comments on: A case study in bad end user setup experience: The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installer

By: Nick

Nick — Sun, 20 May 2007 22:53:48 +0000

[...]and click the unblock button.[..]
Again, where is this button exactly?
Next, about copies. I also noticed this multiplication.
I checked the first copy with (free) app. ‘Unlocker’,
it was not even used by anything(!), and I moved it to the other partition.
Two other copies were ‘used’ by msi and I kept them and run out of space too.
I had 2.39Gb free + I get rid of one copy and still that was not enough!
This means that one has to have at least 3Gb of free space to install 450Mb SP!
Good work Microsoft guys!
Keep on helping out Harddisk companies. BTW, do they pay you?

By: Yuhong Bao

Yuhong Bao — Fri, 04 May 2007 03:01:15 +0000

Try right-clicking the VS2005 SP1 setup EXE, select properties and click the unblock button.

By: Alex Ionescu

Alex Ionescu — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 02:47:33 +0000

Same story here with the SP1 Beta… I thought it only happened in the Beta, but I’m sad to see it happened with RTM as well. I think I’ll be sticking with the beta too, I don’t want to risk uninstalling and installing RTM, I’m afraid it will badly hose the system.

I’m still getting drops of the WDK weekly (just installed 6001 the other day) and I’m sure the linker will be there, since the WDK always has the latest bleeding-edge stuff.

By: Nynaeve » Blog Archive » Upgrades, and taking the plunge to x64 full-time

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 02:03:31 +0000

[...] Nynaeve Adventures in Windows debugging and reverse engineering. « A case study in bad end user setup experience: The Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installer [...]

By: bw

bw — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 23:52:54 +0000

same thing here :( im out of space due to the useless copies of MSI/MSP files

seagate and other hard drive companies must have paid a lot of money for this trick to Microsoft to cache installers (especially 450mb!!!) in C:\Windows\Installer (whoever invented this should get fired), now i have to go to the store and buy some new 120 GB drive, thank you Microsoft, you truly love developers…

By: Vadmyst

Vadmyst — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 18:16:18 +0000

I also experienced sp1 installer failure. I’ve tried twice. First in normal mode ( double-click on the installer :8-) ) and on the second using silent mode without UI and verbose logging enabled.

On the first attempt I’ve got “invalid digital signature of
*.msp file”. On the second try installer generated 35 megs of logs and failed in some custom action.

Decided to wait for a fix for SP1. :8-)

By: Vladimir Scherbina

Vladimir Scherbina — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 07:41:42 +0000

I thought this buggy behaviour was felt only by me. I also installed it on two my development machines and it failed to installl. Btw, you can find my comment on VC blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2006/12/18/visual-studio-2005-sp1-released.aspx

By: Stefan Kuhr

Stefan Kuhr — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:48:11 +0000

In my case it was even worse. I installed SP1 on a machine with W2K SP4 and fortunately it was a VMWare I had properly backed up, because I ended up with two attempts to install SP1 on this machine. The SP1 setup took the liberty to temporarily use as much as 4GB on the %SYSTEMDRIVE%.

By: John

John — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 05:50:51 +0000

MSI was created to install Office. Maybe it’s good at that. It certainly isn’t good at anything else.

By: Not a kernel guy » Инсталлятор Visual Studio 2005 SP1 смог бы обогнать улитку если бы не…

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 04:33:25 +0000

[...] … не создавал 4 копии самого себя в процессе инсталляции. Ken Johnson рассказывает в своём блоге почему инсталляция Visual Studio 2005 SP1 отнимает столько времени. Не иначе Mr. Smith из Матрицы резвится. Tag: Инструменты разработчика posted by Not a kernel guy at 9:33 pm [...]