Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

[CChong]

Has anyone had any luck configuring an application such as MS Visual Studio .NET? I've found that I'm unable to write transforms for .NET ... when I try I get back an error that I have to run setup.exe in order to install the product (same thing for Hummingbird's Exceed 7.1).

I'm attempting to use Active Directory / GPO Software Publishing, and obviously not being able to use or configure an MSI package is a bit of a problem.

[CChong]

Yes it would have been nice if MS followed it's own best practices. I will deploy with ZAP and use an unattended install. The good news is that you can break out the component updates into individual msi's. I tried nesting these but somehow the .net framework would always go south. I also tried to direct edit the msi to hack out the use setup.exe but could not get it to work.

You CAN run the msi directly in advertised mode /j if that will work for you.

[CChong]

out of curiousity how do you break out the component updates?

[CChong]

If you uncompress dotnetfx you will find a msi and the other components also have .msi (bootstrap.msi and weecom.msi) are needed for Windows XP./ Not sure about Win2k

[CChong]

You said you can run the msi in published mode /j? What's the /j flag?

[CChong]

/j [u|m]Package
or

[u|m]Package /t Transform List

or

[u|m]Package /g LanguageID
Advertises a product. This option ignores any property values entered on the command line.
u - Advertise to the current user.

m - Advertise to all users of machine.

g - Language ID

t - Applies transform to advertised package.