Thursday, July 13, 2017

Visual Studio 2013 Web Install Block Compatibility Mode

If you receive an error when installing Visual Studio 2013 (or possibly any version), you may come across several solutions. One says to right-click and select the Compatibility, the others may say to rename the exe file to the original file name and another may say to change some settings on the ISO files to be 'compatible'.
You may do all these things and it still does not want to install. Ever.
Here are the steps you can try that worked for me on Windows 10. Not sure which one finally triggered it to work because after doing 100 things to get it to install you never know.
1. I had previously installed VS2015 before 2013, this may have triggered the problem. I uninstalled VS2015 and then I found a post that recommended clear my %temp% folders. So that is what I did and I did notice there were some 2015 files in there.
open temp folder -> clicking on start and type: %temp% delete files in temp folder
2. Rename the file to the original file name, right click the executable file, go to to the Details tab, see "Original File Name". Rename it to this.
3. I was running the exe from the D: and E: drive this could have been an issue as well, so I copied the exe to the C: drive and ran the exe as Admin. INSTALL RUNNING :)

...UPDATE: I continued to have trouble on a laptop I had purchased. Same problem. But after trying all the same steps, I could not get the install running. I decided to take a break for a few weeks, when I returned to it and used the previous steps, it got past the error. I did a system cleanup, deleted the temp folder again, renamed the file and ran as Admin and that seemed to work.