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General Installation Notes includes information that updates the documentation provided with the March Pre-Release of Microsoft® Visual Studio™ 6.0 -- Development System for Windows and the Internet. The information in this document applies to all products shipped in the Visual Studio suite. Many of the issues outlined in this document will be corrected in upcoming releases.
Contents- Click any of the items below.
Important: This section contains vital information about installing the pre-release of the Visual Studio 6.0 suite. Read all items carefully before you begin your installation.
This section lists installation-related information on programs and files shipped with this pre-release of Visual Studio 6.0.
Visual Studio 6.0 ships with Acme Custom Option Setup Tool (ACOST), a utility for administrators who want to customize the default settings of the Installation Wizard.
To install ACOST, administrators must copy ACOST.exe from the Setup directory on compact disc 1 to the Visual Studio Setup directory on their computer after they have installed Visual Studio successfully.
ACOST needs several files in order to run. These files are installed with Visual Studio.
Do not install either the web download of Microsoft Visual J++ Technology Preview 1 or any version of the standalone pre-releases of Microsoft Visual InterDev 6.0 on the same system with any pre-release of Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise Edition. Microsoft will not provide support for such configurations.
Installing a pre-release version Office 9.0 on the same computer that the Visual J++ Technology Preview 1 or the pre-release of Visual InterDev is installed will prevent all three applications from running correctly. This problem will be resolved in the final release of these products.
We recommend that you not install the March Pre-Release of Visual Studio 6.0 on the same computer you use for work, production, or daily projects.
During setup, the Visual Studio Installation Wizard changes certain registry settings and updates some of your system files. When you uninstall this pre-release version, some registry settings may remain on your computer, and some system files will be changed.
If you have Microsoft Data Access Components 2.0 beta 2, which comes with Visual Studio, already installed on your computer and you run the standard or server setup again, you may get the following error message:
File is installed and supports English. Currently, version number of filename is installed and supports English (United States). The software you are installing contains the same component, but it supports English (United States). Do you want the existing copy to be replaced?
This message is a known issue, and will not affect your setup. You may ignore the message and click either Yes or No to continue.
This section lists issues identified when Visual Studio 6.0 is installed on Windows 95 computers.
The ODBC Custom Action Handler (CAH) works when Visual Studio 6.0 is installed on a computer running Windows NT 4.0, or a computer with Windows 95 and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0. The ODBC CAH fails if Visual Studio is installed on a Windows 95 computer that does not have Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0.
A 64 KB limitation in the Windows 95 system registry may cause a warning to appear when you install Visual Studio 6.0.
When you start installing Visual Studio on a Windows 95 computer, the Installation Wizard checks the size of the system registry. If the Wizard does not find enough available registry space, it will generate this message:
Setup has detected that your system may not have enough registry database space available for a full installation. It is recommended that you read the Readme topic Windows 95 Registry Size before continuing. Continue with Setup?
You can choose to ignore this message and proceed with the Visual Studio installation. However, if you do run out of registry space, setup will not complete. The Installation Wizard can only register components after they are copied to your machine, so the registry failure likely will occur toward the end of setup. You will have to exit setup, increase the registry space available, and then run setup again.
Note If you want to install Visual Studio 97 and the March Pre-Release version of Visual Studio 6.0 on the same Windows 95 computer, consider implementing one of the following suggestions to increase the available space in your system's registry. It is likely that setup will fail if you try to do complete installation of the Visual Studio pre-release to a computer that has Visual Studio 97 installed with the default paths.
To increase the available space in your system's registry, consider the following:
If you are using the text editor of the the Web release of Visual J++ Technology Preview 1 or the pre-release of Visual InterDev, on non-Far East versions of Windows 95, you may see the text editor window behave differently when you choose nondefault script.
The text editor window may go blank or display only part of the text you have entered if you choose a font with a script that is not the default script. For example, if you change the font from Courier New (Western) to Courier New (Cyrillic) on English Windows 95, you will see only part of the text displayed.
To recover the text, on the Tools menu, click Options, then Reset All. Alternatively, choose a font with a script that matches the system.
When the Installation Wizard launches other client or server setups, the Wizard becomes invisible and waits until the installation of a component is complete. When a component setup is complete, the Wizard reappears to allow the user to install another component.
When you install Microsoft FrontPage 98 extensions on some Windows 95 computers, the Installation Wizard may remain hidden for a couple of minutes after the FrontPage setup is complete.
During the time that the Wizard is hidden, if you try to launch the setup program again, nothing will happen because a second Installation Wizard will not start when the program detects that one is already running.
This section lists installation issues identified for server-side components shipped with Visual Studio.
Consult the following table for information on operating system, browser, and other dependency requirements for installation and use of server-side components.
| Operating System | |||||
| Component | NT Server? | NT Workstation? | Windows 95/98? | Requires Microsoft Internet Explorer? | Other Dependencies? |
| Windows NT Option Pack 4.0 | NT Svr. | NT Workstation 4.0 SP3 | Limited on Win95 | IE 4.0 + | None |
| SQL Server 6.5 (DEV Edition) | NT Svr. | NT Workstation 3.51 + | Installs some tools on Windows 95 | No | None |
| SQL Server Debugging Service | NT Svr. 3.51 Sp5 or better | --- | --- | No | Needs SQL server 6.5 (SP3) |
| Visual SourceSafe Server Components | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation 4 | Windows 95 | Yes. IE4 for viewing HTML help | None |
| Posting Acceptor (2.0) | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation 4.0 SP3 | Windows 95 | --- | Install NTOP before PA 2.0 |
| Remote Machine Debugging (Script Debugging) | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation | Windows 95 | Yes. IE4 + | None |
| Visual InterDev Server Components | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation 4.0 SP3 | Windows 95 | Yes. IE4 + | Install NTOP & MDAC & FP Extesions before VIDSS |
| FrontPage Server Extensions | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation 4.0 SP3 | Windows 95 | Yes. IE4 + | Install NTOP & MDAC before FP Extension |
| Fox ISAPI Samples and Extensions | --- | NO OS dependencies (samples) | --- | Any generic browser. | None |
| MDAC 2.0 Update | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation 4.0 | Windows 95 | No | Install after NTOP and Before SNA |
| SNA server | NT4 Svr. | NT Workstation 4.0 | --- | No | Install after MDAC and MTS |
Should you choose to rerun the server setup after first use, you may see an error message Error launching setup from any component.
This error message occurs because certain read-only files may have been left in the temp directory. This is a known issue and will be fixed after this pre-release.
To bypass the problem, delete the file launchbo.exe from your system's temp directory after your server setup is complete. This workaround wil allow server setup to be rerun on the same computer the next time.
During installation of server-side components, the server-side Installation Wizard silently chains the setup for several components (such as NT Option Pack, Systems Network Architecture, and SQL Server).
The NT Option Pack Wizard may throw a dialog box asking if you want to retain any newer files found on the target system. However, as this setup was designed to run silently, this dialog box will only appear as a minimized window on the Task bar.
For setup to continue successfully, click this minimized window, and select the No to all button.
If you install SQL Server 6.5 on the same computer that you have installed Windows NT Option Pack 4.0, some of your Design Time Controls (DTCs) may be overwritten.
If this happens, you will get an error message when you launch Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). The message will instruct you to reinstall MTS.
To prevent this situation, install NT Option Pack after you install SQL Server.
This section lists installation issues that may affect other programs already installed on your computer.
The IISAM Exchange driver requires that Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Outlook be fully installed on your computer prior to installation of Visual Studio. If neither is installed, the IISAM Exchange driver will not register correctly.
To manually correct the problem after you've installed Visual Studio 6.0, you can install Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Outlook and then self-register the IISAM Exchange driver using this command line:
Regsrv32 msech35.dll
This section lists all known setup issues related to computers with non-U.S. versions of Microsoft programs.
On Japanese Windows NT 4.0 systems, a user may see a blank dialog box after initiating a full-text search. The user will not be able to cancel a full-text search that is underway. The full-text search will still work correctly and the blank dialog box will disappear when the search is completed.
On NEC PC98's where the C drive is a floppy disk, if you get the following error Cannot read drive \Device\Floppy0:, place a formatted floppy disk in the drive. Make sure that the drive door is closed and that the disk is properly formatted without errors.
If you are installing this version of Visual Studio 6.0 on a non-U.S. version of Windows NT 4.0, you must first install the appropriate language version of Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3.
To install this version of Visual Studio 6.0 on a computer that uses an international version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, you must install the appropriate language version of Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The international versions of Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 are available from these locations:
The international versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x are available from:
This section lists all issues documented in the Visual Studio Readme (readmeVS.htm). The information in this section may apply to several or all products shipped in the Visual Studio suite. It is more current than the information provided with the suite's online documentation.
This pre-release of Visual Studio 6.0 ships with a beta version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01.
To enable debugging on your Microsoft SQL Server, you must install the server side components of this version of Visual Studio on your SQL Server. You also must run Microsoft SQL Server under a valid user account and not under the "System Account." Under "System Account," SQL Server runs at a higher security level and cannot communicate with remote applications such as the Microsoft SQL Debugger.
To configure the SQL Server login account for SQL Debugging:Note Any errors encountered while debugging the SQL Server will be listed in the event log. Use this log to troubleshoot your debugging process.
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Visual Studio 6.0 ships with Island Hopper, a set of samples that show the Microsoft model for designing systems architecture using Microsoft technologies (such as Visual Studio, SQL Server, and Microsoft Transaction Server). For more information on the Island Hopper sample, insert the MSDN compact disc 1 on your CD-ROM drive, and go to samples\vs98\readme.htm.
Note Some files in the samples\vs98 directory may be old and incorrect. Use only the files identified by the readme.htm in the directory, and follow installation instructions carefully.
In the pre-release version of Visual Studio 6.0, you can use F1 Keyword Help reliably only when MSDN compact disc 2 is in the CD-ROM drive of your computer. Failure to do so may result in the message File not found when you attempt a keyword search.
Visual Studio 6.0 ships with a version of HTML Help SDK, which you may update. To get the latest version of the HTML Help SDK, go to http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/htmlhelp
To use the Visual Studio 6.0 documentation, you need to have the version of HTML Help shipped with Visual Studio 6.0 installed on your computer. If you don't have a compatible version of HTML Help on your computer, and you open the Visual Studio 6.0 Help system, you may get one of these messages:
To fix the problem, copy the file, HHCTRL.ocx, from the \OS\SYSTEM directory on the compact disc to your hard drive as follows:
| If your system is | Copy the file to this directory |
| Windows 95/Windows 98 | (Windows directory)\system |
| Windows NT 4 | Windows directory)\system32 |
This section discusses all issues identified in Data Access SDK 2.0.
The Data Access SDK delivered with Visual Studio requires that the Microsoft Data Access components be installed prior to installing this SDK. Otherwise, when the SDK setup is run, you will get the message:
Unable to load ODBC Control Panel (odbccp32.dll)
To resolve this, make sure that you have run the Visual Studio setup before installing the Data Access SDK.
When attempting to initialize MSDASQL (the ODBC Provider), if you set the initialization property DBPROP_INIT_LOCATION to a valid value and specify that the DATASOURCE is a Microsoft Access data source, a crash will occur.
Do not use the property DBPROP_INIT_LOCATION with MSDASQL and a Microsoft Access data source.
IConnectionPoint::Advise() returns the same cookie for different connections, since it returns the sink pointer as the cookie. According to the OLE specification, Advise() should return a token that uniquely identifies this connection. Typically each sink has a different pointer and therefore a different cookie. If the listener uses the cookie returned by Advise() in a subsequent Unadvise(), it will not unadvise the correct connection. To avoid this problem, do not register the same sink for the same notification.
The Microsoft OLE DB for OLAP provider does not support Windows 95 at this time.