So I finally got around to slipstreaming Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005, and whilst it was a bit tedious, it worked. The basic instructions are provided by Heath Stewart. Here’s the transcript for my session, using my MSDN version of Visual Studio 2005 Professional. I’ll format the numbered steps exactly as Heath did, making cross referencing easier.

The MSDN DVD has two folders: msdn and vs which contains the MSDN Library and Visual Studio 2005 Professional, respectively. I decided to do this from my Server which runs Windows 2003 Server, Standard Edition. This turned out to be a lucky decision, which you’ll see in step three.

1. Install the Product

Well, actually, it’s an Administrative installation of Visual Studio that we’re about to create. I opened up an Administrative Command prompt to work from, just in case. (Yes, I run as a limited user, so I did a right-click of the Command Prompt Icon, and then Run as, etc).

msiexec.exe /a R:\vs\vs_setup.msi TARGETDIR=C:\shared\vs2005 /L*vx c:\Shared\Temp\vsinstall.log

The R: drive is my DVD drive, and C:\Shared\vs2005 is the folder where I’m about to create the slipstreamed version of Visual Studio 2005. Likewise, I’m putting the log file into C:\Shared\Temp. The log file tells me this took about 8½ minutes.

2. Unpack the Patch

Continuing from the command prompt:

VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe /extract c:\shared\temp\vssp1

This took about 7 minutes to extract the MSP (patch) file into my C:\Shared\Temp\vssp1 folder, which I created beforehand using Windows Explorer.

3. Apply the Patch

msiexec.exe /a C:\shared\vs2005\vs_setup.msi /p C:\Shared\Temp\vssp1\VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.msp /L*vx c:\Shared\temp\vssp1\patch.log

This is when I ran into a problem. There’s a known problem with large Installer files/patches on Windows 2003 and XP systems. I noted that they listed the cause as …Windows Installer process has insufficient contiguous virtual memory… When I checked, though, I had 800MB of RAM still free. OK, maybe it’s all fragmented. So I stopped the VMWare Server tasks, which took free RAM up to ~1.4GB, and tried a second time. No dice.

Reading further into the KB article, I followed the link to download the hotfix for Windows 2003, installed it, and then restarted when it was done – a required restart !.

After the restart, the third attempt completed without error. I had ~1.7GB of free RAM before I started. The patch log shows that this took about 13 minutes – not counting the previous failed attempts, nor the time to install the patch, etc.

4. Installing the Patched Product

Heath lets us down a bit here, because he simply points us to a KB article for the non-slipstreamed product, also neglecting the details of how we go about copying across the remaining bootstrap files. OK, there are a number of ways of doing this, but for me, the easiest was to continue using the command line. The magic incantations being:

cd C:\Shared\VS2005
echo .cab > exclude.txt
xcopy r:\vs /h /i /r /s /exclude:exclude.txt

The cd command changes our default directory (folder) to our freshly slipstreamed copy of Visual Studio C:\Shared\VS2005.

The echo command creates a text file named exclude.txt which contains the text .cab.

The xcopy command then recursively copies all files, including any hidden and system files, but exclude(ing) the files whose names or path contain the letters .cab, from the original Visual Studio DVD into slipstreamed folder, intelligently creating any required folders, as it goes. The only thing this xcopy command doesn’t do is to not overwrite any existing files. Instead, you have to press the n key, at the appropriate points. Seven times out of the 100 files copied across, so it’s not mind numbing. On completion, the properties of the slipstreamed VS2005 folder contains 22,237 files in 3,933 folders. 3,185,410,752 Bytes.

The final step was to copy across the msdn folder, as per the Deploying VS2005 via SMS article, linked by Heath (and me). ie I copied  it into C:\Shared\msdn. Another 973 files in 39 folders. 1,671,467,602 Bytes.

Finishing up

Finally, I whipped out the old 1.7GHz Celeron I setup a week or two ago, navigated to the appropriate Network Share and did a full installation of Visual Studio 2005 Professional SP1. This almost worked flawlessly – the version of SQL Express is not compatible with Vista, so I had to cancel at that point. This happens last, so it didn’t seem to effect anything. The full install took about 46 minutes.

Finally, applying the VS2005sp1 for Vista took a further 16 minutes, and the first startup of Visual Studio another minute – building/binding the help system.