Software Deployment

For customised VS installs, you'll need to extract the MSIs which are compressed into SETUP.EXE and apply transforms to those MSIs.

Hi,
You can create an unattend ini file using the below syntax.
c:\setup\setup.exe /Createunattendfile c:\setup\setup.ini
It will capture all your settings , i mean custom settings will be captured and then you can run the below command for silent installation.
c:\setup\setup.exe /unattendfile c:\setup\setup.ini

Thanks,
Joseph.

Hi Joseph,
Thanks for the reply. The application installed successfully with the method you suggested. In my application two setups are there Visual Studio and MSDN 9.0. Both are independent setup so I have created two ini. I am not sure how can I take care of uninstall of this application. Can you guide me if the silent swich is there for the custom uninstall? This application is putting around 22 arp entries. If there is no silent switch I am planning to uninstall using batch or script where I shall use all the product code to uninstall the application in the reverse order it got installed.
Kindly give your input.
Regards,
Hrishi

Hi,

You will have to manually uninstall each application since the switch /u used with the setup\setup.exe only uninstall the main Visual Studio setup.

Here's what I've found:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2007/09/12/4887301.aspx

"Hi Garm - The setup.exe does have a /u switch that you can use to do a silent uninstall. However, that switch will only remove the main vs_setup.msi - it will not remove any of the other MSIs that Visual Studio 2008 setup chains behind the scenes, so I'm not sure how useful it really is.
What I would recommend doing here is something like this:
1. Take the full list of components being installed (from the Manual Uninstall Instructions) section of the topic at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vs2008/bb968856.aspx as a starting point
2. Find the product code for each of them by using the MsiInv tool described at http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2005/07/01/434814.aspx
3. Create an uninstall script that runs msiexec /x for each of those product codes in the exact order listed in that MSDN topic.
There are some components that you may not want to remove as a part of this uninstall - for example, the .NET Framework 3.5 might be used by other products on your system so you may want to leave that behind.
I have a question also - could you explain your scenario in more detail. I haven't run into any cases yet where customers needed to automate the uninstall of VS, so I'd like to learn more about why that is required in your environment.
Please let me know if you have any problems getting the above steps to work."

I had to do this myself last week, I posted an entry in the AppDeploy Package KB section of Visual Studio 2008 with all product codes of every application installed by the /full command but it haven't been approved yet. Take a look later this week, it might saves you a lot of time !

Hope it helps.

Hi Mencaliss,
As this application installs multiple msi we were asked by the customer for direct deployment rather than repackaging it. Thanks for your valuable input. I shall check it and let you know.

Regards,
Hrishi

Hi all,
I am able to install the application using the command c:\setup\setup.exe /Createunattendfile c:\setup\setup.ini and uninstall by using the product code for the respective msi. In this I am not able to uninstall some of the component like Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component. Another issue is I am not able to supress reboot while installing the application. I am installing the application in custom mode. How I can supress the update visual studio is looking for?

Kindly advise.

Regards,
Hrishi