How to roll out MSVC Express Edition (for use with MATLAB) on Win64

We are a work group of about 50 users and made successful tests on our new Win64 machines with R2011a and the supported free C Compiler MSVC 2010 Express Edition.

Can somebody share best practices how to conveniently roll out MathWorks products and the C compiler to the 50 users? Can you distinguish between a situation where the machine is "blank" vs. MathWorks products already installed and just add the C compiler?

Answer 1

[Jason Ross]

Best practices for this kind of situation are to use scripted installations and some sort of package manager that will track the deployment for you. For our deployments of this type, we use Microsoft SMS to do the pushes and tracking.

I have used both the Visual Studio and MATLAB scripted installers, and they are fairly straightforward to figure out. For Visual Studio, there is documentation for the unatteneded install, as there is for MATLAB.

For distinguishing a "blank" machine, you can do something simple (look for the presence of C:\Program Files\MATLAB), or more complex (check the installed programs list for MATLAB).

If you are performing a fresh upgrade, you can also look at capturing an image and using something like WDS (Windows Deployment Services) to deploy the new image via a network boot. Microsoft also has methods to keep user data during an upgrade, as well.

This is actually a pretty broad question, as there are many ways to accomplish this goal -- and like any automated task, a lot of ways to repeat the same mistakes over and over very quickly :)

[Karl]

Yep, that purposely broad, because I hope there are options :-) Thanks, you answer is helpful. It looks the express edition needs the SDK as a separate first edition and I am not sure yet if the users really have to register at MS.

[Jason Ross]

Oh there are options aplenty with this kind of thing. For 50 hosts it's certainly do-able with a couple of scripts and a spreadsheet, but the problem is that it's never just 50 hosts -- you also need to be able to do rebuilds of existing hardware and deploy to new hardware as the old ages out. It can get to be a significant amount of work to keep up with.

Then, of course, there is a new release or patch :)