Team Suite Install Errors with various Package Loaders

February 04, 2006 @ 10:20 pm

This is a real pain in the ass. I just installed a new copy of Visual Studio Team Suite on my new laptop. This is a brand new XP install and VS.NET is about the third thing installed after Office and SQL Server 2005. The install completed just fine but upon starting VS I get several package load errors right from the get go.

Both of these seemed unrelated or not to cause any problems:

Language Package

Data Transformation Packge

But after running for a few minutes it became really obvious that the entire environment is hosed to some degree, specifically the configuration options. Not sure if this is because of the above but I can't configure the fonts for VS.NET. Check this out:

Notice the Show Settings dropdown: There are only three options in the dropdown with the default showing [All Text Tool Windows]. There are no text editor options, and any changes made to the above defaults has no effect whatsoever.

A little lower in the options dialog there's more weirdness – a blank node in the tree. You can expand but there's nothing there. This can't be good.

So, I ran a repair install just to make sure. What a joke that is – the repair install takes 3 times as long as the original install and - get this - restarts the machine 3 times! Restart 3 times? All the stuff is already installed – the original install never rebooted.

Up to now I've been running VS 2005 Professional before without problems so I suspect this is an issue with the Team System install. Everything else seems to work Ok that I've tested at this point, but this is frustrating as hell. The font formatting again is crucial, as I'm giving presentations on this box and 10pt Courier isn't going to cut it.

I just can't understand how Microsoft can fuck up the installer so bad that VS.NET doesn't install on a clean copy of XP. You can't get a more common environment…

What's even worse is that these errors are EXACTLY the same errors I was receiving during the beta when I installed CTPs on VPC and on a separate machine. I talked to several MS folks about this at the time and while they all nodded their heads in agreement apparently nobody bothered to check this out…

Maybe I'm just error prone <g>… but c'mon I can't be the only one having this particular problem and this time around nobody can blame it on my overabused machines. What a freaking waste of time all of this is. The re-install took well over an hour even on this fast machine.

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re: Team Suite Install Errors with various Package Loaders
by Edgardo February 04, 2006 @ 11:21 pm

We should make a list with all the annoying bugs.

Maybe they will <a href="http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewFeedback.aspx?feedbackid=8b3b0db9-0e3b-4eb3-8967-b1edb4dc220f">listen</a>

re: Team Suite Install Errors with various Package Loaders
by Steve February 05, 2006 @ 6:09 am

Rick, with all you've got going on it's very kind of you to post all the nonsense you go through, as to me this is 'real life' and shows how things never really change as software and hardware 'evolve'.

I'm so 'scared' by all this that if I ever get a laptop I'm going to buy an external USB 2.0 HD and load all my crap on that and carry it with me where ever I go! Someone needs to invent a better way to move environments from PC to PC.

re: Team Suite Install Errors with various Package Loaders
by Rick Strahl February 07, 2006 @ 12:58 pm

Ok, so I did a complete uninstall and then reinstalled (which incidentally was much, much quicker than a 'Repair' install) and now everything seems to be in place.

Here's what I found before the uninstall though. I specified a custom install folder (d:\programs\vs2005), but in my original install I went past the option dialog where that option could be set, then backed up to change it. Even though I specified the old directory somehow VS installed into the standard Program Files directory. However some pieces seemed to install into the vs2005 folder. I suppose this could have potentially caused the problem, but this is really odd behavior.

Uninstalling VS.NET is not a trivial matter either - you have to make sure you uninstall things in the right order and don't omit things.

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/10/27/485987.aspx

It sure would be nice if Microsoft included a more complete uninstall utility as part of the install instead of making users unwittingly uninstall in the wrong order. How are you supposed to know unless you've run into hassles like this?

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