Now that Windows Vista is here, I know a lot of people are going to want to run GAT/GAX and Software Factories on the new OS. While it is possible to run these on Vista, there are some known issues with the June 2006 CTPs of GAT/GAX, especially around installation.

In order to install GAX, GAT or any current patterns & practices Software Factories on Windows Vista, you should follow these steps:

1. Download the appropriate MSIs (GAX/GAT/factories) and save them to your hard disk

2. From the Start Menu, click All Programs and Accessories

3. Find the Command Prompt icon, right-click it and choose "Run as Administrator". Then accept the User Account Control prompt

4. Change the command prompt directory to the location you saved your MSI installer files, eg cd c:\downloads

5. Launch the appropriate installer files from the command prompt, eg msiexec /i GuidanceAutomationExtensions.msi

We know this process is painful,but hopefully it will get you going for now. Also we have not yet fully tested GAX and GAT under Vista, so there may be other issues that we don't know about yet. But the good news is that we are currently working on a minor update to GAX and GAT to resolve these issues so everything will work smoothly on Vista. We'll give more details on the scope and timing of this release as soon as we know them.

One more thing to note: at this time, Visual Studio 2005 has its own share of issues with Vista, some of which will be addressed with SP1 and some of which will be fixed in a future patch (see Soma's blog for details). We'll make sure that the upcoming GAT/GAX release works with these fixes too.

thanks

Tom Hollander
Microsoft patterns & practices

One more tip for successfully creating new guidance package solutions with GAT under Vista,courtesy of Victor "vga" Aprea. Out of the box, when attempting to create a new GAT solutionyou'll see an error Cannot find registration information for template "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Guidance Automation Toolkit\Templates\\Items\Action\Action.vstemplate". Package templates may not be properly registered. Run package installation again and verify template name and location. Here is Victor's advice to work around this (which worked great for me):

Go to the [GAT INSTALL FOLDER]\Templates\Solutions\Projects\GuidancePackage

And modify the GuidancePackage.vstemplate file (you’ll need to run elevated to be able to touch that file) so the <TemplateReference> for the Action item template looks like this:

<TemplateReference Name="Items\Action\Action.vstemplate" Target="\Actions"/>

Instead of the default which is:

<TemplateReference Name="\Items\Action\Action.vstemplate" Target="\Actions"/>

You only need to remove the starting slash. That will make Vista happy.

Needless to say, this is on our list of things to look at for the next release too.

- Tom

Hi Magnus,

I think that the issue you're describing is related to the fact that you're installing WCF on the beta version of VSTS (as VSTS is used for development of WCF itself).

-Victor.

I am trying to install GAX on a Vista Ultimate installation. I keep getting error code 2869 when installing. I get it both by launching it from explorer or from doing the cmd prompt workaround.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Lee

Hi Lee,

I got the sama problem when trying to install GuidanceAutomationToolkit. I had already installed GuidanceAutomationExtension using normal ways then I tried to install GuidanceAutomationToolkit and always got error code 2869.

What I did was to uninstall GuidanceAutomationExtension then reinstall by using the cmd trick and then using same trick installed GuidanceAutomationToolkit. This did the trick for me. Im using Microsoft Vista Enterprice.

Hope this helps.

Gudmundur Jon

Tom,

Any ETA on the Vista update yet?

I was able to Install the GAT/GAX however i am not able to install the Factories, I get the error telling me that i need to install the june CTP or 1.1 version of the GAX.

Sorry for the delay - it should be available by the end of February.

Tom

Any of them, Web Service, Web Client and the error is

the installer requires the guidance automation Extensions June 2006 CTP which is not present on the computer. Please install it and try again

However the june CTP is installed.

Tom,

I tried the above instructions (even after rebooting, with no instances of Visual Studio open) and I still get the same 2869 error. Any other ideas?

Best Regards,

Kevin McNeish

Microsoft .NET MVP

I am trying to reinstall the Web Service Software Factory using the Dec 2006 refresh.

“Web Service Software Factory - December 2006 (refresh).msi�/font>

Hi,

I also have a problems with installing GAT and GAX under Vista, but your solution solve them. Big thanks.

Lukasz

Bimmer51,

I had the same problem... I tried everone's seemly simply solutions...

I still got the error ... so then I eventually went into the uninstall screen

within Vista and did "repair" ... then did and "uninstall" and "BLAM!"

it was gone.

Hi,

I had installed MSCF long back and then I installed SCSF May2007 with latest GAX ..It was working perfectly fine. But now my MCSF is not working. So I uninstalled everything including GAX which I recently downloaded for 2007 release.

Now when I tried uninstalling "MCSF"...It says...it needs Guidance automation Extension v1.1 which is not present in my system....... now when I looked into the registry mentioned above....I have

Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio.RecipeManagerPackage, Microsoft.Practices.RecipeFramework.VisualStudio, Version=1.3.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a

as the default value...and hence it is not finding v1.1....

Now what should I do ? Control Panel/ Add or remove programs does not contain anything other MCSF related to GAX/CAB. and I cant uninstall MCSF.

Regards

smitha

We've updated the MCSF to run with GAX and GAT's latest release as well as with Orcas and 3.5.It's an internal release by now but we will be publishing it soon on gotdotnet.

Please contact me if you needadditional information.

Also please notthis a non-microsoft/p&p release, thisis a simple community update.

Using cmd line method works great on a clean install on vista, however when trying to upgrade from VS Orcas to VS 2008 RTM, I could not uninstall or repairGAT or GAC or even the WCSF and SCSF!! without resorting cleaning out the registry. Not good