VS.NET 2005 SP1 Demystified

VS.NET 2005 SP1 is one of the things that makes you pull your hair out, I have spent so long time trying to figure out why it's taking all this long time, I ran it about 3-4 times and every time it takes about one hour and then throwing one error saying : "The installation source for this product is not available. Verify that the source exists and that you can access it.", and once I click OK, it rolls back everything, that's really irritating, I used to tell the team mates that it's taking longer time than Windows Server 2003 SP1 takes, however after so many trials and searching, I am recaping it all in this post.

VS.NET 2005 will take an ample time up to 2-3 hours depending on your machine, however also the time it's taking depends on the the components you installed during installing VS.NET 2005, for me I have all the features installed and I have installed Team Foundation Server, TFS, Team Explorer, however if you are updating VS.NET 2005 on Windows Vista you will need to install another batch after you finish installing SP1, you can get this update from this location; Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista.

Let's get back to the error message that you may get while installing SP1, "The installation source for this product is not available. Verify that the source exists and that you can access it." After getting this message, I checked the event viewer and found one error under Application category, the error source is MsiInstaller, the error message I have got is saying: "The installation of C:\DOCUME~1\Kareem\LOCALS~1\Temp\ZNW19\VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.msp is not permitted due to an error in software restriction policy processing. The object cannot be trusted." after some searching I found this on Microsoft Help and Support, you can check it at: Error message when you try to install a large Windows Installer package or a large Windows Installer patch package in Windows Server 2003 or in Windows XP: "Error 1718. File was rejected by digital signature policy, it simply clamis that the error is because of the large size of MSI package, and actually VS.NET 2005 SP1 is 431 MB (452,643,696 bytes), so it may fail if you don't have enough memory, also I tried to increase my virtual memory, despite having 1GB RAM, but it didn't work. second reason that you will find at Microsoft help and support is that the package may be uncorrectly signed, I edited the registry but it didn't work with me, I proceeded through the solution section, and I edited the software restriction policies, please to get the full steps check the above help and support section.