.NET Musings

I’ve been using Visual Studio 2010 for a while now, and it’s been great.  Much improved over 2008.  I’ve heard the twitterati complain about crashes, but I have been luck/blessed/whatever, and haven’t had any of those problems.

Today, I tried to add Visual C++ into my installation (I tend to install just what I need when I need it to keep the size small) through the “Add or Remove Features” option in the install wizard.  Every time I ran the install I was prompted with this lovely dialog:

A quick search of the interwebs showed this was a common occurrence in VS2008 with SP1 installed, but not much in the way of VS2010.  The errors can be located in the log files for VS2010 %temp%\dd_install_vs_vstscore_100.txt, and for me they all involved messages similar to:

“Unable to retrieve the install directory for Silverlight4Registry in COptionsPage::IsGoodAllComponenentsPath”

Turns out the answer is buried in some comments on a msdn forum (full page located here).  If you installed some of the early versions of Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, everything gets hosed.  The answer is to simply remove all Silverlight 4 components through Add/Remove Programs (in your control panel), install the latest version (found here), and then you can updated your Visual Studio install without issue.

Happy Coding!