As a developer I have need for a wide variety of software tools. While I normally install these on an individual basis it can be useful to install multiple utilities at once, especially when I’m rebuilding my development environment. For this https://www.ninite.com/ can be extremely useful.

ninite.com let’s you choose one or more tools to be installed, such as winRar, Putty, Visual Studio Code, Filezilla FTP, Java Runtime, etc. You can then download a single install package that installs them all in one go.

A nice time saver.

Installing MSSQL 2017 Developer Edition on my relatively clean development VM today I was getting an error part way through the installation:

Error installing Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable
VS Shell installation has failed with exit code 1638.

The installer then continued, but at the end I was told that the Database Engine and a couple of other components were not installed correctly.

I tried downloading a newer MSSQL installer, but that still didn’t work.

I tried installing the Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable (per several suggestions from others).  That made no difference.

In the end it boiled down to the fact that I already had Visual Studio 2017 installed and that had installed the Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable.  I ended up having to remove the Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable component using Windows Add/Remove Programs (being sure to uninstall both the x86 and x64 versions).

After a reboot for good measure, the MSSQL 2017 installer ran fine.

I then went back and re-installed the Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable x86 and x64 components using the following links:

• https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/f/e/1febbdb2-aded-4e14-9063-39fb17e88444/vc_redist.x86.exe
• https://download.microsoft.com/download/3/b/f/3bf6e759-c555-4595-8973-86b7b4312927/vc_redist.x64.exe

And fired up Visual Studio 2017.

I recently received this error when trying to commit a local GIT repository in SourceTree:

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

  git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

fatal: unable to auto-detect email address (got 'username@MACHINENAME.(none)')

This was weird as I had already used the indicated commands to set my commit options.  Running “git config –global -l” in a Git Bash shell (I am running on Windows 10) resulted in the following:

$ git config --global -l
user.name=My Name
user.email="myemail@sixthimpulse.com"
branch.autosetuprebase=always
pull.rebase=true
rebase.autostash=true

After a bit of searching online, I discovered one possible problem was my email address.  Notice the quotation marks around the email address.  When I configured my email address I used the following:

git config --global user.email "myemail@sixthimpulse.com"

All the examples showed the quotation marks.  Instead, I should have left them off like the following:

git config --global user.email myemail@sixthimpulse.com

Now my global GIT config looks like this:

$ git config --global -l
user.name=My Name
user.email=myemail@sixthimpulse.com
branch.autosetuprebase=always
pull.rebase=true
rebase.autostash=true

Unfortunately, that still didn’t work.

A bit more digging and I noticed that when I opened a Terminal window from inside SourceTree and tried to set my user.name, like so:

git config --global user.name "My Name"

I  got an error back:

error: could not lock config file C:/WINDOWS/system32/config/systemprofile/.gitconfig: Permission denied

From there it was pretty simple to deduce that I needed to run SourceTree as an administrator and then I was able to commit just fine.

Not sure how this got changed, but at least I can commit now.