Windows Installer Technical Articles
Reasons why your setup may fail on Windows Vista
Windows Installer is not just a technology but also a set of rules and best
practices. While these rules have been specified in the SDK for several years,
many of them haven’t been enforced, and ignoring them didn’t break your setup.
But on Windows Vista setups that don’t follow best practices may eventually fail
on Vista.
This article doesn’t talk about the new features of MSI 4.0 on Windows Vista.
It’s intention is to help you avoid those pitfalls, or to fix your setup to make
it compatible with Vista. It includes a list of problems that cause setups to
fail on Windows Vista, while they seemingly worked properly on Windows XP. In
many cases the problem becomes evident because of UAC (User Account Control): On
Vista, even members of the Administrators group work with restricted permissions
most of the time.
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
Using Dual ListBoxes as Replacement for a Multi-Selection ListBox
With
Windows Installer's user interface tables you cannot create listboxes that allow
selection of multiple entries. This article explains an alternative solution
that uses two list boxes side by side, one for "available" items and one for
"selected" items, with Add and Remove button to move entries from one list to
the other. It also shows how to dynamically populate MSI tables using VBScript
custom actions (to add rows to the ListBox table or to remove them), and how to
refresh a dialog using the "twin dialog" trick (which is required to refresh the
listboxes on screen after adding or removing items).
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
GERMAN:
Deutsche Version dieses
Artikels
Multi-Language MSI Packages without Setup.exe Launcher
With embedded language transforms you can build a multi-language Windows
Installer package that automatically runs in a language that matches the
operating system language, without need for a setup.exe launcher. This is an
undocumented feature in Windows Installer (works with MSI 2 and MSI 3). While
this functionality is not documented because it has not been tested extensively
by Microsoft, the MSI redistributable package (instmsi.exe) internally makes use
of it. This article describes how to make use of this feature in your own setup,
which is quite easy.
Read the full article
Written by Andreas Kerl
GERMAN:
Deutsche Version dieses
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RUSSIAN:
Перевод на русский язык доступен по ссылке:
http://www.installsite.ru/go/embeddedlang.htm
A Developer's View of the GDI+ Security Vulnerability
You've probably already heard about the critical security vulnerability that
Microsoft has discovered in their GDI+ library. While most articles about this topic describe which actions you
should take as a user of Microsoft products, this article will focus on
the implications this vulnerability has for software developers,
particularly in setup programs.
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
GERMAN: Die deutsche Version dieses
Artikels steht unter
http://www.installsite.de/go/gdiplus.htm
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Перевод на русский язык доступен по ссылке:
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Rob Mensching's View of Windows Installer
Rob Mensching is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft. He's
been with the company for a bit over four years now and most of that time was
spent on the Office setup/deployment team beating the Windows Installer (aka
MSI or Darwin) into submission. Before he was hired as a "full timer" he was
an intern on the Windows Installer team, where he created things such as
msifiler.exe, msival2.exe, orca.exe, and wrote the original Merge Module (aka
MSM) specification and merge API (mergemod.dll). Rob is running a Blog where
he discusses basic and advanced Windows Installer topics and also talks about
the hiostory of MSI.
List of Blog articles
Creating a Better Installer
When your coding and testing is finally complete, you still need
a sure-fire, well-behaved installation routine. Phil presents some important
points to keep in mind to make sure you’re making the right first impression
with your users.
Read the full article
(Windows Developer Network - registration required)
Written by Phil Wilson
RUSSIAN:
Создание лучшей
инсталляции
A COM Registration Spy
Installation is one of the messier areas of testing. Installing
COM objects can splatter a variety of data all over your registry, and if you
fail to roll one of them out before the next test, then the same test may
mysteriously behave differently when run twice in a row. This article shows
how a new Windows 2000 function, RegOverridePredefKey(), can give you
programmatic control over the registry I/O of COM objects.
Read the full article
(Windows Developer Network - registration required)
Written by Phil Wilson
Customizing Windows Installer
The latest version of Microsoft's installation software is
Windows Installer, which presents a new way of doing things at install time.
This article helps you get acquainted with the new installation philosophy,
and demonstrates how you can get control to handle custom installation tasks.
Read the full article
(Windows Developer Network - registration required)
Written by Phil Wilson
Writing Setup Packages for Your Access Databases
Learn how Microsoft Access developers can create custom Microsoft Windows
Installer (.msi) setup programs for their Access .mdb files using the Northwind
sample database as an example. How to include supporting files (help files,
readme documents, and so on) into the setup package is also illustrated.
Read the full article
(MSDN)
Written by Sanjay Jacob, Microsoft Corporation
Deploying .NET Applications: Lifecycle Guide
Provides development and procedural guidance for developers deploying .NET
applications, and discusses the issues and processes for deploying .NET
applications. The article covers the following topics:
- Manage the deployment process in different environments, such as
development, test, staging, and production.
- Understand the dependencies of your solution on the .NET Framework.
- Become familiar with deployment technologies, such as the Microsoft
Windows® Installer service and the setup and deployment projects provided by
Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET development system.
- Understand the issues that affect specific types of solutions, such as
Windows Forms applications, Web applications and Web services, and Windows
service applications.
- Understand technical issues associated with installing modern
distributed .NET applications, such as:
- COM interoperability
- Shared and private assemblies
- Configuration files
- COM+ applications
- Serviced components
- Application resources (such as message queues, event logs, and
performance counters)
- Registry settings
- Localized resources
- Choose appropriate packaging mechanisms based on specific application
requirements.
- Choose appropriate distribution strategies for actually deploying your
solution.
- Understand and manage the issues with upgrading and patching your
applications after they are installed in the production environment.
Read the full article
(MSDN)
Written by Kenny Jones, Martin Harwar, and Edward
Jezierski, Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Windows Installer 2.0
Microsoft has released version 2.0 of the Windows Installer runtime files and the
Windows Installer SDK. Besides support for Windows XP and 64 bit applications, this
version includes bug fixes and introduces useful operating system properties, e.g. to
detect whether setup is running on NT Workstation or Server, or an XP Professional or Home
Edition. It also significantly simplifies updates by eliminating the need for complicated
ADDLOCAL and REINSTALL constructs, and no longer requires a reboot after installing the
runtime files. The good news is that you can benefit from these improvements in your
existing projects. Some modifications in your authoring tool may be required to install
the new runtime files. As a result of the improvements and fixes in MSI 2.0 you may find
that your setups and patches behave differently than they used to or even fail. Even if
you don't include MSI 2.0 in your own setup, the new version may already be present on the
target machine, so you should at least include MSI 2.0 in your testing scenario.
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
Installation Phases and In-Script Execution Options for Custom Actions in Windows
Installer
When creating a custom action in InstallShield Professional - Windows Installer Edition
you have several in-script execution options to choose from:
- Immediate Execution
- Deferred Execution
- Rollback Execution
- Commit Execution
- Deferred Execution in System Context
This article explains what these options mean and how they affect in which phase your
custom action is executed at installation run time. It also helps you to insert the custom
action in the correct location in the user interface or execute sequence, in order to
avoid error messages like "Cannot write script record. Transaction not started."
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
GERMAN:
Deutsche Version dieses
Artikels
RUSSIAN:
Перевод на русский язык доступен по ссылке:
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Detecting Internet Explorer and Other Applications with Windows Installer
Often applications require that a certain version of Microsoft Internet Explorer or
some other third party software be installed on the target system. For instance, HTML Help
requires Internet Explorer 3.0. This article explains how to search for Internet Explorer
5.5 or above and abort setup with an error message if it is not found. The same technique
can be used to search for other applications.
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
Custom Setup Options in Windows Installer
Most Windows Installer based setups offer you to perform a Custom setup type, where you
are presented a tree view of all features. Attached to each feature is a drop down menu
with options as shown in the screen shot below:
It's not very obvious how Windows Installer decides which choices will be displayed,
what their effect is in your setup at runtime, how they relate to the settings in the
feature and component properties of your project, and what you can do to remove undesired
options. This article tries to shed some light on all these secrets. It is mainly based on
observations and experiments, since I didn't find most of this documented in the Windows
Installer SDK.
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
Component, package, product and upgrade codes in Windows Installer
You can seen these alphanumeric strings in curly braces - also known as GUIDs - in many
places in InstallShield Professional - Windows Installer Edition. This article describes
the purposes of these component IDs, package codes, product codes and upgrade codes. It
gives guidelines when you should change these codes and when not. And it explains why you
can't use human readable strings in these places. (This article was originally published
in the December 2000 issue of the InstallShield Newsletter.)
Read the full article
Written by Stefan Krueger
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