With all my travel for conferences and other events lately, I was a bit slow to install Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2010. But now I'm home for the winter, and getting caught up with life on the bleeding edge. And one of the priorities was the "new" beta (actually out since mid October).
Wham! Alas, I was hit by an installation issue, a rather befuddling one. During initial installation, I received this error message: "Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 - Visual Studio 2010 Tools: [2] WARNING! Setup Failed for optional component Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 - Visual Studio 2010 Tools. MSI returned error code 1603." Various Google searches on that didn't lead me to anything useful. I did a reinstall/repair, which finished successfully. So I thought that all was well.
But what was weird was that VS 2010 was installed, and worked fine. The only problem was that the MVC 2 project templates didn't appear in the New Project dialog box. Not good, since my next project is to work with the new MVC features and support in VS 2010.
After going round and round with the problem, the details of which I won't include here since none proved useful, I posted a message on the www.asp.net MVC forum, of which I'm a moderator. Fortunately, Jacques Eloff, a member of Microsoft's ASP.NET team, monitors that forum and jumped in to help. He had me use Microsoft's Collect.exe tool to gather various log and installation information, which pointed to the problem and potential solution.
Unfortunately for the forum, at that point we took the discussion offline because I had to send Jacques some log files (dd_AspNetMvc2.msiXXX.txt and dd_VS2010ToolsMvc2.msiXXX.txt generated by collect.exe), but here is my description of the resolution that I posted to the forum:
With Jacques' help offline (I had to send him some log files), the problem is now solved. I want to post the resolution in case anyone else faces the same problem.
The problem had something to do with the failure to register the MVC templates, done using devenv.exe /installvstemplates, which registers project and item templates. This was being manifested in the installation logs with these items, which Jacques dug out:
(SERVER) MSI (s) (14:08) [10:51:02:619]: Note: 1: 1722 2: VisualStudio_VSSetup 3: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe 4: /installvstemplates
(SERVER) MSI (s) (14:08) [10:51:02:740]: Product: Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 - Visual Studio 2010 Tools -- Error 1722. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action VisualStudio_VSSetup, location: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe, command: /installvstemplates
Apparently the repair/reinstall option just affects items that were successfully installed, so it wasn't even trying to repair this problem.
In my case, the fix was rather simple (although time consuming, given how long it takes to run through VS 2010 installation!):
1. Uninstall the Visual Web Developer component of VS 2010
2. Reinstall the Visual Web Developer component
Poof! Problem solved. For good measure, I rebooted between the steps, but I doubt that helped any.
Thanks, Jacques!
So we really don't know why the initial installation failed, since the initial 1603 message is a pretty generic error. Hopefully Microsoft will figure out the problem before release so that no one ever again has to feel my pain of being deprived of MVC. (Which, by the way, is looking to be a vast improvement over Web Forms. Stay tuned!)
One of the best projects that I've been involved with this year--other than the SQL Server 2008 AppDev courses, of course!--was the SQL Server MVP Deep Dives from Manning Publications. This is an extraordinary book for two main reasons:
- The chapters were written by 53 Microsoft MVPs, including some of the best and brightest on both the DBA and developer sides of SQL Server. It blows my mind that such a diverse herd of cats came together to produce such a book. The result is good, really really good.
- All of the authors' royalties--every last cent--is going to an amazing charity, War Child International.
Here's the official description:
This is no ordinary SQL Server book. In SQL Server MVP Deep Dives, the world's leading experts and practitioners offer a masterful collection of techniques and best practices for SQL Server development and administration. 53 MVPs each pick an area of passionate interest to them and then share their insights and practical know-how with you.
SQL Server MVP Deep Dives is organized into five parts: Design and Architecture, Development, Administration, Performance Tuning and Optimization, and Business Intelligence. In each, you'll find concise, brilliantly clear chapters that take on key topics like mobile data strategies, Dynamic Management Views, or query performance.
I was privileged to contribute chapter 16, Table-Valued Parameters, one of the best of the new T-SQL features in SQL Server 2008.
The project was conceived by Paul Nielsen and managed to completion by Paul, Kalen Delaney, Greg Low, Adam Machanic, Paul S. Randal, and Kimberly L. Tripp, all of whom also contributed at least one chapter.
The book launched at the SQL PASS Summit last week in Seattle. It's been a long time since I've been involved in a book launch, but this one was amazing. As you can see in the photos below, the event started with a few words by the main participants, followed by a long line of book signings. Some 30 of the authors were on hand to sign books, and a LOT of people brought their books for a signature. On top of that, we signed copies for Microsoft executives and each other. It was a hoot!
If you have anything at all to do with SQL Server, please consider picking up a copy. If you buy it through this link, War Child gets a bit larger slice of the price. And even if you don't want the book, please consider making a donation directly to War Child! They do amazing work.