Creating Unattended installs of VS 2005 Beta 2

Performing unattended or "silent" installs in VS 2005 Beta 2 was surprisingly easy. Last night I downloaded the team suite iso from MSDN Subscriber downloads and then extracted the iso to a folder on my computer. In the root of the image there are 4 folders, one of which is the VS folder. Inside VS we find lots and lots of cabinet files, several folders and a setup.exe and vs_setup.msi folder. These launch a guided installer which includes MSDN but in my case I just wanted to automate the settings for my VS installs.

Inside the VS folder there is also a setup folder which contains the exe we want to launch from. If we look at the command line argument help for this exe we see options for creating an unattend file, using a specific unattend file, turning off event logging, turning off error logging and creating a transform file (I tried this first as it seemed similar to the way I automate Office installs but had no luck launching an automated installs with the mst file)

I found it easiest to launch the setup program inside the setup folder with the following syntax: "setup /CreateUnattend MyVSInstall.ini"
This launched the administrative mode setup which allowed me to walk through the setup process and make my selections and rather than immediately perform the install it created an ini file with my information.

I then went back and launched setup passing the UnattendFile argument with the path to my install file and without any other switches VS installed itself silently and without any user prompts.

Very nice guys, thanks for making this easier.

Once again, the quick version

1. Launch setup from inside the vs\setup folder with the /CreateUnattend yourfilenamehere.ini argument.
2. Go through the setup process and make your custom selections
3. Launch setup from inside the vs\setup folder with the /UnattendFile yourfilenamehere.ini argument.

Voila, you have done it.