I recently went x64 Windows Server 2008 as my primary desktop OS. Im enjoying the speed, reliability and having MOSS on my desktop. One small annoyance I ran into was that the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS12.exe) was not supported on my OS of choice.
After some searching I found that the msi installer OS version checks can be worked around. Delighted by this, I started to figure out how...
First, download and install Windows SDK for Windows Server 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 6.1
Get the SDK at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e6e1c3df-a74f-4207-8586-711ebe331cdc&displaylang=en&tm
The reason for that is you'll need to make use of Orca to touch up the msi. For those of you thinking Orca is a type of killer whale as I did, a small brief description is pasted below from the Windows SDK:
Orca.exe is a database table editor for creating and editing Windows Installer packages and merge modules. The tool provides a graphical interface for validation, highlighting the particular entries where validation errors or warnings occur.
This tool is only available in the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers. It is provided as an Orca.msi file. After installing the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers, double click Orca.msi to install the Orca.exe file.
Those still interested about the killer whale aspect, I suggest some rather entertaining reading while you wait for the Windows SDK installer to complete at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orca where I found a wealth of information about this whale.
Once you sorted with the installer and now can challenge any marine biologist about Orca whales - lets carry on with these steps to get VSeWSS 1.2 installed.
1. Run VSeWSSv12.exe
2. Copy C:\Program Files (x86)\MSECache\vsewssv12.en-us to a temp folder
3. Open Orca (from the platform SDK) and load VSeWSSv12.msi
Mine installed at C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1\Bin\orca.exe
3. Cut out the following rows:
InstallExecuteSequence > X64System,
InstallUISequence > X64System,
InstallExecuteSequence > WSSNotInstalled
InstallUISequence > WSSNotInstalled.
4. Save and Run the edited MSI from your temp folder
Now Im not sure why there isn’t a x64 version available yet and I doubt this work around is supported so ensure you use it on your dev environments only.
Another issue is you will not be able to deploy solutions/features directly from Visual Studio. A sad end to this story but at least you got the extension.
Over n Out... in support of marine biology...
MarcL