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Visual Studio 2008 and Visio for Enterprise Architects

December 3rd, 2009 Leave a comment Go to comments

I have started working on a new project in .NET and the Problem Domain (PD) was modeled in Visio UML.  Fantastic.  Now I wanted to forward engineer the UML into C# classes to begin development, but wait, I can’t.  I only have Visio 2007 Professional, and the forward engineering features are only available in the Visio for Enterprise Architects version.  Okay, not a problem, I’ll go download it from MSDN.

After starting the installation, I got an error message, “You must first install one of the qualified Visual Studio editions”.  What the hell?  Visual Studio 2008 isn’t good enough?  I sure as hell don’t want to install another, older version Visual Studio just so I can install Visio for EA.

After poking around, I came across this registry trick.  Visio for Enterprise Architects is looking for the existence of the following key:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Setup\VS\VSTD\

Within this key should be the String value “ProductDir”.  The text value for ProductDir can be anything other than a null value.

Once you add this key to your registry, the Visio for Enterprise Architects installer will work as hoped.

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  1. Hasan
    December 21st, 2009 at 18:21 | #1
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    Very helpful !

    Thanks,
    – Hasan

  2. Scott
    December 24th, 2009 at 11:46 | #2
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    Thanks, but Visio 2003 for Enterprise Architects was a no go in Windows 7 x64. However, I was able to add the ProductDir key to:

    HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Setup\VS\VSTD\

    Visio 2003 for Enterprise Architects on Windows 7 automagically worked after this change.

    -Scott Owen

  3. Eric Silva
    December 24th, 2009 at 11:51 | #3
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    @Scott

    I just ran into this problem the other night installing Visio EA on my own Windows 7 x64 laptop. I had not started hacking at the registry yet. Thanks for the tip.

    -Eric

  4. Andrew
    January 5th, 2010 at 14:17 | #4
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    Note, the text value for the string must not be NUll. I tried with null and it did not work. I added the text “test” and Voila!

    Thanks,

    Andrew

  5. Moojjoo
    February 16th, 2010 at 23:55 | #5
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    This is exactly what I needed. Thanks

  6. Rory
    March 8th, 2010 at 07:20 | #6
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    fyi if trying to install Visio for enterprise architects 2003 then the required registry key is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\7.1\Setup\VS\Arch with a string value ‘ProductDir’.

  7. Pradeep
    May 7th, 2010 at 14:13 | #7
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  8. Lew
    November 8th, 2011 at 18:03 | #8
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    Worked for me. Thanks.

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