Fixing missing VCBuild.exe

From the yeoman generator for angular, when installing socket.io:

MSBUILD : error MSB3428: Could not load the Visual C++ component "VCBuild.exe". To fix this, 1) ins
tall the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK, 2) install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 3) add the location of
the component to the system path if it is installed elsewhere.

These instructions may be useful when encountering less helpful messages about a missing "VCBuild.exe" file in other programs.

You can download the .NET framework v2.0 SDK here.
You can download the Visual C++ 2005 ISO from the link in this blog post.

Then you can use this utility from Microsoft to mount the iso image and run the installer.  To mount the ISO, follow the instructions in the README extracted from the utility.  Make sure to run the Virtual CD ROM Control Panel executable as administrator.

I had problems with permissions with that utility, so I took the easy way out and just burned the Visual Studio ISO to a disk.  VirtualCloneDrive probably would have worked but I didn't feel like messing with it.  After all, this is just a step toward configuring a development environment...

I received a few errors about compatibility issues when installing for both Visual Studio 2005 and MSSQL Server Express.  I ignored those and continued with the installation.  The files of interest were placed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC.  I also noticed vcvarsall.bat (a file that gets referenced many times when trying to compile components on Windows) was just one directory up at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\VC.  I added both to my PATH.

After those steps, everything worked fine.

EDIT

I ran into this same problem on another machine, and found this solution for installing the 2008 Express Edition of Visual Studio.  Follow the link and run the installer.  This worked as well as installing the 2005 edition but was much faster.

Note that this second solution just installs a 32 bit compiler.  Also it may be necessary to install a different version of the compiler depending on the version of python you are running.