Grant Holliday

Aaron Ruckman has asked for comments on what people would like to see in the next generation of setup.exe for Visual Studio.

• Do people like a lot of install options or just as few as possible. Typical / Custom is fine. I use Custom if typical includes companion products I don’t want - which is most of the time.
• Installation type: 
  • Do people install through the UI or silently? Both
  • Do you launch and forget about the installation or watch it go? Fire-and-forget
  • Is there a silent installation method that you would like to see supported in the future? Record an answer file, pass as command line parameter
• What is a reasonable time to install the product? Shorter than VS2005 SP1
• Do people like the companion products that we install? No - ditch them by default.
• Do people ever look at the installation logs? If so, what for? Only when there’s a problem
• How do you deploy your applications to your customers? WiX MSIs or ClickOnce or web
• How often and under what circumstances do you uninstall Visual Studio? Never. If an uninstall is required, then it’s probably time to rebuild the OS.
• How often and under what circumstances do you add/remove features to/from Visual Studio? I used to have to go back and install VB, but now I just install it to start with

My two favourite Microsoft installers to date are:

• Server products: Exchange 2007
• Client products: Office 2007

I would like to see the Visual Studio installer go the direction of the Office installer:

• Pop in a DVD (or mount the ISO)
• Enter a product key
• Accept License agreement
• Press “Install Now” (or optinally
• Press Next
• Come back in X minutes when it’s done.

In all the times I’ve installed Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, I usually select the following options: