Commands That Must Be Run After Installation

If you deploy your extension through an .msi file, you must run devenv /setup as part of your installation in order for Visual Studio 2012 to discover your extensions. For more information about how to install extensions for Visual Studio 2012, see Visual Studio Extension Deployment.

Finding devenv.exe

You can locate each version's devenv.exe from registry values that Visual Studio installers write, using the RegLocator Table and AppSearch Table to store the registry values as properties. For more information, see Detecting System Requirements.

RegLocator table rows to locate devenv.exe from different versions of Visual Studio

AppSearch table rows for corresponding RegLocator table rows

For example, the Visual Studio installer writes the registry value of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Setup\VS\EnvironmentPath as C:\VS2008\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe, a complete path to the executable the installer must run.

Note    Because the RegLocator Type column is 2, it is not necessary to specify additional version information in the Signature Table.

Running devenv.exe

After the AppSearch standard action runs in the installer, each property in the AppSearch table has a value pointing to the devenv.exe file for the corresponding version of Visual Studio. If any of the specified registry values are not present — because that version of Visual Studio is not installed — the specified property is set to null.

Windows Installer supports running an executable to which a property points through custom action type 50. The custom action should include the in-script execution options, msidbCustomActionTypeInScript (1024) and msidbCustomActionTypeCommit (512), to ensure that the VSPackage has been successfully installed before integrating it into Visual Studio. For more information, see CustomAction Table and Custom Action In-Script Execution Options.

Custom actions of type 50 specify the property containing the executable as the value of the Source column and command-line arguments in the Target column.

CustomAction table rows to run devenv.exe

Custom actions must be authored into the InstallExecuteSequence table to schedule them for execution during the installation. Use the corresponding property in each row of the Condition column to prevent the custom action from being run if that version of Visual Studio is not installed on the system.

The value of the Sequence column for each custom action depends on other sequence values in your Windows Installer package. Sequence values should be such that the devenv.exe custom actions run as close as possible to immediately prior to the InstallFinalize standard action.

InstallExecuteSequence table to schedule the devenv.exe custom actions

See Also

Other Resources

Installing VSPackages By Using Windows Installer