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I cannot find any reference to the Windows Installer on the chart. I have also tried Google, but cannot find a direct answer to my simple question: "Can I add the Windows Installer XML (Wix) to the Community Edition of Visual Studio 2015?" If any one knows the answer, please let us know. It's kind of important to me. In previous versions of VS you had to have at least the Pro version for this plug-in.
I do not want to go through the whole rigmarole of installing VS 2015 Community Edition, just to find that I cannot have WiX!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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As far as I know, Community Edition is identical with Professional when it comes to features. I remember reading that the only difference is the license.
I haven't used WiX, but I have no problem installing all other kind of add-ons, free or paid. I see no reason why Windows Installer should behave differently.
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Yes, you can use WiX and other extensions, such as Laurent Kempe's excellent Git Diff Margin, with VS Community Edition.
Note that WiX toolset does not currently appear in Tools/ Extensions and Updates for VS2015 (any edition); it must be downloaded directly from WiX Toolset[^]
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I expect that still doesn't include SSDT and SSDTBI -- correct me if I'm wrong.
Regardless, why would anyone want "everything"?
At work, I have VS 2012 Ultimate. I do only a very small amount of WinForms development in C#. I mostly do SSIS, which means adding SSDTBI. Also we use TFS. Everything else included in VS Ultimate is wasted on me. I could probably use VS Express with SSDTBI and access TFS only through the command line and Shell Extensions (or whatever they're called) -- I already have my own console utilities to do certain things in TFS via the API.
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You must have an existing install of Visual Studio 2015 Professional, Enterprise, Express for Web, Express for Desktop or Express for Windows 10 to apply this update.
Doesn't mention Community edition, but if it works in Pro, then it works in Community.
SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2015 isn't out yet. It's expected some time after SQL Server 2016 is released.
Consider yourself corrected. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Richard Deeming wrote: Consider yourself corrected
No, I thought the OP was saying that Community came with everything already included. So I'll consider my argument supported.
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You trust the various VS uninstallers to properly clean up after themselves?
All the different versions of VS I still need to hang on to go in a separate VM. Cleanup doesn't get any easier than that.
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You are so right.
They are still uninstalling --- and it doesn't give me the feeling that they're going to clean themselves off properly. Ugh!
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In my company I have an old PC which is now surviving the VS 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012.
With all its "updates" and "service packs" it is a mess in the software settings 
Press F1 for help or google it.
Greetings from Germany
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Your PC is 10 or more years old? I suggest you talk to your boss about a new machine!
How do we preserve the wisdom men will need,
when their violent passions are spent?
- The Lost Horizon
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My PC's only 3 years old; but I have versions of VS as old as 03 installed on it. I've got 03, 08, 10, 12, and 15.
My next PC here definitely won't have 08 or 12 since I've upgraded everything I care about that was done on it to 2010 solutions and never used 2012 in production. I might be able to get rid of 2010 too by upgrading all my solutions again to 2015.
I'll still need 03 for regression checking though; the version of the app build in that uses a custom grid that won't compile to newer versions of the framework. (Not sure why, I spent about a day trying to make it work in 08 (05?) years ago before cutting my losses and porting to the new far less sucky .net 2.x datagridview class.)
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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I know. Unfortunately, it all becomes a huge mess.
Maybe that's Microsoft's "upgrade" plan.
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can't upgrade 2013, but you have to uinstall and install 2015 seperately
That's not true. You can't upgrade vs2013 to vs2015 neither do you have to uninstall vs2013 to install vs2015. They are totally separate products. Same with older version. They work parallelly without interference.
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right. separate products.
Imagine if your web browser were the same way.
You'd have 629 versions of Chrome on your machine. 
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Separate products, yes.
Common dependencies, also true.
Plenty of common settings in the registry? Take a guess.
Do you think there exists any third party dependencies that does not work with both versions at the same time?
So while you really can have several versions on your computer, the older ones tend to not work as advertised anymore IMHO. The new ones neither now that I think of it.
My recommendation would always be a reinstall of the computer if you want to have a newer version of VS.
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That's what I thought too.
That's why it doesn't entirely make sense that when you go to install a newer version that Microsoft's installer doesn't ask you if you want to remove the old version or something.
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They are separate products, you may not have value in the old version after an upgrade but many other people do.
In C++, each version of VS comes with a huge set of libraries that are vastly different from each other. The libraries are part of the VS installation, not some shared common library. This is good for backwards compatibility etc.
Such as how VS2012 comes with an early implementation of C++11, while VS2015 comes with a C++11/14 almost complete.
Also the compilers are different in each version, and having separate versions on your machines allow you to compile for each one.
In Web development or something a lot of people may not care about previous versions, but VS is an IDE that caters to "most" developers, and upgrading over a previous install isn't always appropriate.
And finally VS2015 fixes most issues mentioned in this post, on installation almost every major feature is now option to set to install. Installing C++ support can be disabled in VS2015 so the install size is gigabytes smaller than before.
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Interesting. Thanks for posting.
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NB: Make sure you check the Usage section: [^]
Community can't be used for commercial software; only individual use, charity/education, or open source work (or in small (<250 employees) companies, five developers can use it).
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A word of warning:
I've installed VS 2015 community a couple of months ago for trial purposes, with VS 2010 installed on the system. I had no problems, and could use either.
Now that we've decided to purchase VS 2015 Pro, I've uninstalled VS 2015. It appeared to work, although, as you noted, the uninstallation rocess took quite some time. (~10-15 minutes - I didn't really check)
Then I started VS 2010 again and loaded a solution: unfortunately, the solution wouldn't load: it claimed that a dependency, .NET 4.0 was missing! I checked program installations, but there still was a dotnet 4.0.1 installation that I could see! Even after restarting, dotnet 4.0 was still being shown. Yet VS 2010 kept complaining that it was missing: clearly, the VS 2015 uninstallation must have broken something, although it wasn't clear what.
To cut the long story short: it wasn't .NET 4.0 that was missing, it was the -NET Multi-targeting Pack - whatever that is supposed to be! I got it back by 'repairing' the VS 2010 installation.
tldr; You can install VS 2015 side by side with an earlier version, but if you ever uninstall it (or the previous version), you may need to repair the remaining installation(s).
On a sidenote: the solution in question is 100% C/C++ unmanaged code. no idea why there is any link to .Net at all...
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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That's a good and interesting post related to all these uninstall / install challenges.
I will keep it in mind. Thanks
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Does anyone else go through this... my mother never keeps her cell phone on. She turns it off like it's a regular phone and when I want to call her I have to call the old land line first and tell her to turn her cell phone on. Then I can call that.
So tell me, does anyone else go through this?
Jeremy Falcon
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Kinda wondering why, having called the land line, you don't just talk to her there and then!
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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I do, but sometimes you gotta send your mom a picture over a text.
Jeremy Falcon
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Jeremy Falcon wrote: sometimes you gotta
No, you don't.
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