Yesterday I attempted to install Visual Studio 2008 from a DVD onto my
mac parallels Windows 7 instance. After sitting back and admiring the
pictures of happy Microsoft programmers provided by the VS
installation software, I heard a ticking sound coming from my
computer.  After several minutes, the install crashed. Some sleuthing
proved that the disk was scratched and worthless – a typical Monday.

And yet the job needed to be done. So I proceeded to download the
3.3Gb .iso file from Microsoft’s website. Being without DVD, I
wondered if there were a quick way to get Visual Studio installed from
the iso without having to download and install additional software.

There was.

Now, I could have installed WinRar or Daemon Tools in Windows 7 to
open the .iso, but mac provides support for built-in .iso mounting.

Double clicking on the .iso in Finder mounted the .iso in OSX. After
this I attempted to open the VS setup.exe file using Windows Explorer.
No luck: the Mac mount was not visible to the Windows OS, so setup
failed immediately with missing .dll exceptions.

So, I had to take this one step further and copy the mac-mounted .iso
to a separate folder. After doing this, I was able to open the
setup.exe from within the new mounted folder without a problem.

Full list of steps:

• Download your .iso
• Double click in mac finder
• Recursively copy the mounted image to another folder
• Open the setup.exe file from within the copied folder using parallels Windows Explorer