How to work around a possible XNA Game Studio or Windows Phone SDK install failure on Windows 8

I am not sure if you guys know Aaron Stebner. Aaron works at Microsoft, and has pulled thorns from my side many many times already. His blog is at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner and it is a gold mine of tips and tricks to debug and solve many cryptic issues happening during installation and removal of programs. For example, Aaron taught me how to remove programs that do not appear in the Programs and Features list, amongst many other things.

The last nugget I used from Aaron’s blog saved my butt just before a presentation where I had to run both Visual Studio 10 with the Windows Phone SDK, and Visual Studio 11 for WinRT development. Of course this had to be on Windows 8. Unfortunately when you install the Windows Phone SDK on Windows 8, you may (or may not, I saw both scenarios) encounter an issue with XNA, and the installation fails. Unfortunately, even if you don’t use XNA in your apps, this will prevent even normal Windows Phone app development. Fortunately, Aaron has a fix for that.

I hope that this helps spread the word, and increase Aaron’s blog’s visibility!

Happy coding,
Laurent

 

Print | posted on Friday, April 06, 2012 11:03 AM

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# re: How to work around a possible XNA Game Studio or Windows Phone SDK install failure on Windows 8

left by James Manning at 4/6/2012 7:45 PM Gravatar
A couple of particular posts of Aaron's that have helped me with issues around the msi database in the past.

* using msiinv to see what's in the database

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2005/07/01/434814.aspx

* using smartmsizap (replacement for the older 'msizap' in the Windows SDK) to kill off entries *if and only if* the msiexec uninstall doesn't/can't work

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2005/10/30/487096.aspx
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