How I got around Zune’s “NO INSTALLATION MEDIA” and “Can’t Find the Media for Installation Package” error

 I recently reinstalled Windows 7 on one of my computers and in rebuilding my development tool set, including for Windows Phone, and found I could not run a Windows Phone 7 project locally: Visual Studio complained I did not have the Zune software installed. Okay, not a problem; I will install Zune. But not so fast…

I encountered the following mysterious error while trying to install the Zune software to my Windows 7 desktop.

What does this Zune error message mean?

NO INSTALLATION MEDIA

Can’t find the media for installation package ‘Windows Media Format SDK’. It might be incomplete or corrupt.

Error code: 0x80070002

Searching around the internets did not help, though I saw a reference to do a few things, one of which was to install the latest Windows Media Player. Well… it turns out, I had NO version of the Windows Media Player installed, so I simply installed the latest, and the Zune installer was happy…

One more step

But Visual Studio 2010 was NOT yet willing to allow me to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator to test and debug my Windows Phone applications. I saw the following additional (but improved!) errors from Visual Studio.

First, could not deploy. Nothing new here:

But the reason provided looked more promising:

This is a better known error, easily rectified. Simply switch to the emulator if your project is referencing an attached device, done at the top of Visual Studio as shown here:

Okay… now back to Windows Phone 7 development – of course, with a Windows Azure back-end using the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone 7.