VS Shell Redist Size...

Question

Hi

 

We were planning to use the Visual Studio shell in isolated mode to host our application.

The redist has just been released, and it seems a little on the large size....390MB.

 

This is to big to distribute as part of our application, as people just won't bother if the downloads 400MB.

 

Are there any plans to break this redist down into smaller parts or maybe something that only downloads whats it needs?

 

Regards

Simon

 

Answer 1

Hi Simon,

I think that will be a nice suggestion to reduce the size. You should suggest it on Microsoft Connect website.

Please post a link to your submition to make us able to vote for it too.

Thanks,

Answer 2

Hi Simon,

Have you post this issue to our Connect feedback portal?

If you have submitted it, we will appreciate it if you can share the feedback address so that it can be found and checked out by other community members having similar suggestions.

Thanks!

Answer 3

I have posted this on Connect Feedback

https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=312271

I will update this thread, with any feedback.

 

Thanks Simon

Answer 4

Thanks for your valuable feedback.

Answer 5

I have voted for this suggestion.

Answer 6

Still no feedback on this, Ill update the thread if I get any response from MS.

Answer 7

As far as I know, 200 MB of VS Shell is actually .NET FX 3.5. And guys from Microsoft "are looking into building a different setup bootstrapper so that the redist package doesn’t include .NET FX. Instead, the bootstrapper will figure out if the target machine already has the FX yet or not. If it doesn’t, it will automatically download and install it. That would shave 200MB off the redist pack".


Hope that new bootstrapper will be released soon.

Answer 8

We are looking at different solutions for the deployment story and one of them is the setup bootstrapper.  However, it is possible to get a smaller VSShell installer today.  You would start by extracting the files from the vs_shell_isolated.exe and including only the components you need.  Here is the breakdown of what the 383 megs of the redist contains:

 

 

273 megs for the .Net FX

11 megs for the remote debugger

54 megs for the web designer core

 

This leaves 45 megs for the base Visual Studio components.  This means that, theoratically, you could get an installer that installs all of the required Visual Studio files under 50 megs.  You would have to validate that all the requirements of your shell are present on the system or that the user can get them separatly.

Answer 9

Thanks for this info, this definitely sounds promising, are there any issues with licensing if we break up the redist this way?

Answer 10

 

There should not be any problem.  You can have a look at one of the first example of VS Shell setup available here : http://www.codeplex.com/WarcraftAddOnStudio

 

You can contact our marketing dept to confirm that your solution is within the license agreements. 

Answer 11

A new version of the redist is now available which is 127MB.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fd340c29-2ef8-4984-96ed-f42e441223fd&displaylang=en

I still recon this is to big to distribute, and I think it will download and install .net 3.5 if its not already installed....

But its a kick in the right direction, I'm not sure how much stuff relies on the 3.5 runtimes, but from what I can tell its mostly built in .Net 2.0, so it would be nice to see a cut down version that just contained the shell and the .net 2.0 components.

Cheers

Simon

Answer 12

Thanks for the input Simon.

We're working on ideas on how to reduce the size of it in future releases. 

There won't be a lot of changes from now till Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM but we'll definately investigate this for a future release.