Marius Bancila’s Blog

I said it before, the Visual Studio installer gets me mad. All is fine until you want to install the Service Pack. After that you cannot install additional components until you uninstall the SP. Because of that, you should make sure you installed the entire Visual Studio package before installing SP1. So I did, but it proved not enough. Here is the story of what happened today.

1. I installed Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate on my machine (a couple of weeks ago).
2. I installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1. So far all was good, I was able to use it with no problems.
3. But then I decided to install the Windows Phone developer tools, following the steps described on this page. After that, when I started Visual Studio 2010 I got this message that SP1 was applied only partially and in order to start the application it must be applied to all components (which was weird because I did that before a couple of times and everything was fine).
4. I have installed the SP1 again. Then, when I started VS2010 it worked.
5. However, I wanted to install the Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK to be able to automatically build my text templates when building the solutions, as described here. This SDK needed Visual Studio 2010 SDK installed on the machine. But when I ran the installer for the SDK I got the following error:

   

   Obviously the error message was non-sense, not only I had VS2010 installed, but it had all the components, and the service pack was applied. Knowing the problems with the service pack, I immediately figured it was the reason.

6. I have uninstalled the Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Of course, while it was uninstalling it crashed, so I had to start it again.

   

7. I started the Visual Studio 2010 installer just to make sure I had all the components installed. However, I ran into this error:

   

   After several failed attempts I decided to restart Windows. That did the trick and the installer started correctly and I could make sure all the components were there.

8. I installed Visual Studio 2010 SDK successfully.
9. I installed Visual Studio Visualization and Modeling SDK successfully.
10. I installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1 successfully.

Then, three hours later, I could start working with Visual Studio 2010 again. Text templates are automatically built, and the Windows Phone tools are working correctly.

Puff!

I ran across a breaking error while trying to install SQL Server 2008 on a Windows 7 machine. The rule “Previous releases of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008″ failed. Here is the error message that I received.

Rule "Previous releases of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008" failed.

That was odd, because I actually had Visual Studio 2008 with SP1 installed on that machine. So I start looking for answers and found this Knowledge Base article (KB956139) from Microsoft that said that if Visual Studio 2008 SP1 was installed then “No action is required.” Obviously that didn’t help at all.

Then I start looking into the logs (which are located under C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Setup Bootstrap\). There is a log file called Detail.txt that revealed the following error:

2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to create base registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, machine
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\IDE
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey 1033
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to get registry value SP
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to get registry value kind for value SP
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Found Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 edition IDE, language 1033, SP level 0.
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 edition IDE, language 1033 does not have required SP level. Upgrade Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to the SP1 before installing SQL Server 2008.
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to create base registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, machine
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\STD
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to create base registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, machine
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\PRO
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to create base registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, machine
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\VSTD
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to open registry subkey 1033
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to get registry value SP
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Sco: Attempting to get registry value kind for value SP
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Found Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 edition VSTD, language 1033, SP level 1.
[...]
2009-11-25 17:09:35 Slp: Rule evaluation done : Failed

It looked like the IDE’s version was not correctly specified in the registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\VS\Servicing\9.0\IDE. This post from Heath Stewart’s blog explains how to detect the version of Visual Studio 2008. The SQL Server 2008 installer looks in the right place, so the only explanation was that there was incorrect data there. So I started regedit.exe and looked at the key. To my surprise there was no IDE key there.

No key for IDE

But then I remember I was running Windows 7 64-bit and there are several registry editors (I’m still confused which to use when). So I opened the one located under C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ and this one shown more keys under DevDiv, and under Servicing\9.0 I could also see IDE.

Incorrect version of VS 2008 IDE

As you can see from the screenshot, the SP value was 0, and SPName was “RTM”. The Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installer didn’t update these keys. (Well, that wasn’t such a big surprise, because the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installer really sucks, but that’s another story.) So, what I did was to change those keys as shown in the following image. SP and SPIndex should have the value 1, and SPName should be “SP1″.

These are the correct values

Also, make sure that the same values under the parent (Servicing\9.0) are 1.

Correct values for SP and SPIndex unde Servicing\9.0

After making these changes I ran the setup again, and this time it worked like a charm. If you run into the same error and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is installed then check these registry values and make sure they indicate that SP1 is installed.