Visual Studio 2005 extensions for WCF and WPF installation after installing .NET 3.5

When .NET 3.0 was released, Microsoft provided a Visual Studio 2005 extension for WCF and WPF. This extension contains tools to ease development of these new technologies (for example, the Configuration Editor Tool that is quite useful to edit WCF configuration files).

If you are still using Visual Studio 2005, these tools are very useful (while not mandatory) to use .NET 3.0.

As I was reinstalling all my stuff on a new laptop, I started by installing .NET 3.5 SP1, then Visual Studio 2005. I only realized later that I forgot the WCF and WPF extensions for Visual Studio.

The first problem I encountered was that this extension is not available anymore on Microsoft's web site. This is not a mistake, and the why is that Microsoft wants to encourage users to move to Visual Studio 2008. Nice, thanks guys. You can read the details here.

Anyway, it is not too difficult to find this download. I personally found it on ZDNet.

Running the installation, I ran into some issue. The installer complains that a prerequisite is missing:

Setup has detected that a prerequisite is missing. To use Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), November 2006 CTP you must have the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime installed. Please install the .NET Framework 3.0 runtime and restart setup.

So, the installer is kind of dumb and checks that .NET 3.0 is installed, and only this precise version.

Once more, the solution is quite easy and can be found here.

The installer apparently checks for some registry key, so creating it is sufficient. The key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\{15095BF3-A3D7-4DDF-B193-3A496881E003} under which a string value of "DisplayName"="Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0" is needed. In my case, I had to create the last directory too.

After that, the installer process complained about some documentation issues but still ran correctly. The registry key can safely be deleted after the install process.

Update: alternatively, you can run the following command in a DOS prompt:

msiexec /i vsextwfx.msi WRC_INSTALLED_OVERRIDE=1

This will display the same warning message about .NET 3.0, but you can still install after the warning.