MVC Installation Issue with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2
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!)