{"id":78,"date":"2006-12-14T13:37:37","date_gmt":"2006-12-14T12:37:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=78"},"modified":"2006-12-14T13:37:37","modified_gmt":"2006-12-14T12:37:37","slug":"installing-xna-game-studio-express-on-vista","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/78-installing-xna-game-studio-express-on-vista.html","title":{"rendered":"Installing XNA Game Studio Express on Vista"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I attended a conference on XNA game development<\/a>. More on that soon; but first a quick note on what happened when, fired with enthusiasm for XNA, I installed the release build of XNA Game Studio Express<\/a> on Vista. <\/p>\n

At least I tried. You have to install Visual C# Express first (since for some reason XNA does not work with the grown-up Visual Studio 2005). That’s OK since it works side-by-side. Visual C# Express went on OK, but setup for XNA Game Studio Express failed towards the end of the install with an error about a file that could not be run. The install then rolls back completely leaving you with nothing.<\/p>\n

I ran msiexec with logging to see more detail. Here it is:<\/p>\n

\n

Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor. Action: RegisterWithCSExpress, location: E:\\, command: “C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\\Common7\\IDE\\VCSExpress.exe” \/installvstemplates <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It occurred to me that even an install without the templates might be of some use, or perhaps I could manually install the templates. So I ran up Orca (MSI editor), opened the InstallExecuteSequence table, and deleted the RegisterWithCSExpress action (yes, I’ve wrestled with MSI<\/a> before).<\/p>\n

The hacked install ran OK, and to my surprise the templates were present. This might be because of the earlier failed install, or because I also ran: <\/p>\n

VCSExpress.exe \/installvstemplates<\/p>\n

from the command line. This command, which tells VC# Express to refresh its template cache, is the one that fails. On my system it causes VC# Express to crash, which is why it trips up the XNA install, but it appears to install the templates before it crashes so it is kinda OK.<\/p>\n

My official advice therefore is not to try and install XNA on Vista, but the above may help if you are determined.<\/p>\n

Microsoft knows about problems with Visual Studio on Vista<\/a>; we are promised a “Vista Support Update” next year. In the meantime it does mostly work if you run it with elevated permissions.<\/p>\n

I noticed that the Microsoft folk were running XNA on Vista yesterday.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: xna<\/a>, vista<\/a>, visual studio<\/a>, visual c# express<\/a><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I attended a conference on XNA game development. More on that soon; but first a quick note on what happened when, fired with enthusiasm for XNA, I installed the release build of XNA Game Studio Express on Vista. At least I tried. You have to install Visual C# Express first (since for some reason XNA does … Continue reading Installing XNA Game Studio Express on Vista<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,80,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","category-software-development","category-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}