Error installing Visual Studio 15 Preview 4 - Windows 7 SP1 requires KB2952664

Question

As per the latest announcement from Microsoft here I'm trying to install Visual Studio 15 Preview 4 on my machine. My machine is Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise edition. I had already installed Visual Studio 15 Preview 3 but now I want to install Preview 4. The moment I try to run the installer "vs_bootstrapper.exe" downloadable from above mentioned URL it fails with following error.

Windows 7 SP1 requires KB2952664.

It shows the above message in a message box without any other redirection to some error log file or retry option.

I also tried running the installer exe with administrative privileges as well but to no success. I'm stuck. Can anyone help me if you also have faced or fixed this issue?

Note: I'm on a hyper-v box.

Answer 1

Visual Studio community link from Daniel A. White helped me resolve this issue. The problem is faced by many users and you can find the details here. Quoting from the thread:

It seems that installer is looking for a file named "dismapi.dll". This file has to be present in either %windir%\system32 or %windir%\SysWow64 or any subdirectory.

A (dirty) workaroud is to create an empty file named dismapi.dll in any of those directories and then you can install Preview 4... :)

As suggested in the problem thread, creating a dummy dismapi.dll file in %windir%\SysWow64 path helped me get past this issue. After creating the dummy file, the welcome page of the installer finally popped-up. The first solution to create the dummy file in %windir%\system32 didn't work for me. The two alternative solutions could be OS dependent. Mine was Windows Server 2008 R2.