Installing Visual Studio .NET via GPO

[SophieT]

A customer would like to install Visual Studio.NET via GPO; however the .msi file requires a setup.exe to launch it...

Has anyone tried this / got a solution whereby I can launch the .msi directly without modifying it, or am I going to need to modify the .msi to get it to run? Any advice or guidelines are very welcome!!

Sophie Tidman, INSTALLSHIELD EMEA

[praveenl]

It seems to me that the machine does not have the windows installer engine installed MSI needs hence the error. You probably need to update all the machines with MSI engine before deploying the .NET

[SophieT]

Praveen,

Thanks for the response, but that was not it. There are actually Custom Actions that run conditionally based upon the installer being launched from the setup.exe. In order to avoid directly editing the .msi and removing these Custom actions, I simply created an .msi wrapper that launches the setup.exe for Visual Studio. We have tested and this works fine. It seems to be the only solution without editing the .msi directly.

Best regards,
Sophie

[RajeshTammana]

It is not recommended to edit the msi file directly to avoid the errors. Setup.exe could be checking for some legitimate pre-requisites before installing the msi file.

It may be illegal to modify VS.Net's msi file also. Make sure you confirm with MS before doing that.

One option is to use SMS instead of GPO to distribute the VS.Net. Another option is to create a dummy wrapper exe to launch this exe.

Regards
Rajesh Tammana
InstallShield Software Corporation.

[SophieT]

Rajesh,

Yes, I'm aware of the dangers of modifying the .msi,
this is why I created a wrapper.

Problem solved. Thanks,
Sophie

IS EMEA