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Why do installers need to be painful

When installing Silverlight 2.0 beta 1 I encountered the following error:

An Error Has Occurred:
Silverlight Tools cannot be installed because one or more of the following conditions is true:

1. Visual Studio 2008 RTM is not installed.
2. The Web Authoring feature of Visual Studio is not installed.
3. A previous version of the Silverlight Runtime is installed.
4. A previous version of the Silverlight SDK is installed.
5. The Visual Studio Update KB949325 is installed.
6. A previous version of Silverlight Tools is installed.

To continue, please install or uninstall the appropriate products and run this installer again.

First of all... This is ridiculous, the installer knows EXACTLY what is missing... so what is it?  Why do I need to hunt down one of 6 possible problems?  Just tell me EXACTLY what is wrong, or better yet, FIX IT!  If I need to uninstall something, then DO IT, obviously that is what I WANT to do to make this work.  If I need to Install something, then go get it and install it (unless of course it is VS08 which would make me a complete idiot for trying to install this without that)  or point to the Trial Version with a darned link already.

I know that VS08  and the Web Authoring feature are installed...
I already uninstalled the previous Silverlight stuff I have...
I looked in Installed Updates and don't see the referenced KB Update...
I already uninstalled the previous SDK Tools and Rebooted...

So, this "error" is of course, NO HELP.

If companies want to make tools and have them get widespread adoption, then they need to be smart and helpful, not say:

Uhhhh, something bad happened and I can't help you, later dude.

So, where is the log of the installer so I can manually go track down an error that the installer should be intelligently informing me about...

UPDATE:

Apparently the Registry Entry “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\ToolboxPages\Silverlight Components” must not exist or the installer fails.  After simply removing this entry, the install worked without a hitch.  This must not get removed correctly by some versions of the Silverlight Tools.

More information for resolving problems can be found here.

 

posted on Wednesday, March 05, 2008 2:57 PM

Feedback

# re: Why do installers need to be painful 3/5/2008 8:04 PM Bo      

Steele, did I miss the Beta 1 release announcement? Where did you download the install from?

# re: Why do installers need to be painful 3/5/2008 8:06 PM Bo      

Why does it always work this way, as I soon as I clicked submit I checked the other posts and there was your link to the download. Thanks anyway!

# re: Why do installers need to be painful 3/5/2008 9:37 PM brian      

Thanks for that.

# Interesting Finds: March 6, 2008 3/6/2008 6:52 AM Jason Haley      

# re: Why do installers need to be painful 3/7/2008 5:03 PM Chrisk      

Yes, thanks for that.

# re: Why do installers need to be painful 7/18/2008 12:08 PM RH      

I agree. This is happening in Beta 2 also but this time it's not the ToolboxPages key in the registry. I haven't found the problem yet. Arrrgh.

This is lazy coding at its best (worst).

# re: Why do installers need to be painful 11/11/2008 4:08 PM Videolar      

Yes you are right

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