Visual Studio is the primary way for developers to create applications for Microsoft’s various platforms. For a while now, it has been working on Visual Studio “15” where it boasts to be the most versatile way to develop so far.
It’s been no secret that Visual Studio “15” is working on creating a more flexible installer. It plans to have a setup and installation process that will load exactly what you need when you need it. That way, you don’t have to install more than what is necessary for your project.
To power the intense amount of components required to do what it needs to do, the Visual Studio “15” is going to have a brand new setup engine built from the ground up. According to the latest blog post from the Visual Studio blog, this new engine is inspired by product managers such as NuGet and NPM.
Behind the scenes of the new setup engine, the registry query wasn’t a fast enough solution for the team’s idealization of Visual Studio “15”. So instead, they created ‘product instances’ that will make a private registry. This not only made it faster but easier for partners to look for a product.
The COM server DLLs that implement this functionality will be installed by the setup engine and available on any systems with at least one instance of a product installed. If
CoCreateInstancereturnsREGDB_E_CLASSNOTREG(0x80040154) or aCOMExceptionis thrown in managed code with the sameHRESULT, it’s a good bet no instances are installed.
Developers can now identify what components are or are not installed and where other compilers might be located.
Most of the blog post is technical jargon just to say that Visual Studio “15” is committed to fast, easy, and accurate installation for each product. We’ll be sure to see more about Visual Studio “15” as it develops, but you can download the preview over on the official software page to try it out for yourself.
