I have primarily used Visual Studio 2003, and its tool for building an installer was pretty painful. Files and folders had to be added manually, one by one. I am looking at upgrading to VS 2008, and I'm not sure what its installer is like. Also I'm interested in installers for non-.net applications. Are there good, open source opti...
I'm working on a quick setup program in Visual Studio and wanted to change the banner bitmap. Anyone know off-hand what the ideal (or req'ed) dimensions are for the new banner image? Thanks. ...
I'm working on a setup which wants to include the Microsoft.Web.Services3 (WSE 3.0) DLL. However, I typically do not like including Microsoft DLL's in our installs except by way of Microsoft's redistributables. There is both a developer and a redist install package available from Microsoft. So, as a best practice, should I include the s...
Ok, I've got a problem here with an MSI deployment that I'm working on (using Installshield) we have a program running in the background that needs to run per-user, this needs to start automatically without user intervention. The problem is with GPO/AD deployment the application is started in the SYSTEM context before anyone is logged ...
Hi, I added a custom install action to my installer to add one of my installation directories to the System PATH environment variable. After I run the installer, the PATH variable reflects the changes (when I access it through the Control Panel::System applet), but when I start a new command shell, the PATH variable does not reflect the ...
We've seen an issue where one of our installers (msi) returns the error code 2908, which is used to indicate that an assembly failed to register. Later in the installation, we get the following (sanitized) error: MyAssemblyName, version="1.0.1.1", culture="neutral", publicKeyToken="119EFC79848A50". Please refer to Help and Sup...
I just noticed that Chromium was installed in AppData in both Vista and XP. If Google does that and if other applications does this, than is that becuase there is some form of protection? Should we write installers that does the same thing as Google? ...
How can I make a major upgrade to an installation set (MSI) built with Wix install into the same folder as the original installation? The installation is correctly detected as an upgrade, but the directory selection screen is still shown and with the default value (not necessarily the current installation folder). Do I have to do manual...
I'm using the VS2008 installer (plus a custom Orca action) to create an installer for my .NET product. I just recently found out that one of the third-party assemblies I was using is x86-specific (as it includes some native code); thus, x64 customers were getting crashes on startup with errors about the assembly not being appropriate fo...
Using Windows Installer (targeting XP and Vista), is there a best practice for installing demo projects and files with your application? ...
I have a need to manually setup the registry settings for an entry in Window's Add/Remove Programs (for XP and Vista). Everything works except for the displayed size. According to this 2004 post by Raymond Chen it should be possible by setting the EstimatedSize registry value but it doesn't work. This more recent MSDN page says the Es...
I have a WSI installer package that I'm using to install my application. The application itself can be run by a normal user, but I have a configuration app that should only be run by a system administrator. Thus, I don't want it to appear in the Start Menu for all users, just for the administrator. Is there any way to tell Windows Ins...
I need to execute a batch file as part of the un-install process in a Windows installer project (standard OOTB VS 2008 installer project-vdproj). One cannot execute a bat file directly from the Custom Actions in the installer project, so I wrote a quick vbs script to call the required bat file. vbs code: Set WshShell = WScript.CreateO...
How do you update your SQL sever database when installing your product's update? Are there any tools that will integrate with windows installer? My typical schema changes are: Adding/removing columns Adding/removing tables. Adding views. Adding/alter indexs. ...
I am trying to install PHP onto my development box (XP SP3 / IIS 5.1) I've got PHP 5.2.6 stable downloaded (the MSI installer package) and I am getting an error "Cannot find httpd.conf". After that the install seems to breeze by quickly (more quickly than I would have expected) and when I try to execute a simple PHP script from my loca...
We have a 3D viewer that uses OpenGL, but our clients sometimes complain about it "not working". We suspect that most of these issues stem from them trying to use, what is in effect a modern 3d realtime game, on a businiss laptop computer. How can we, in the windows msi installer we use, check for support for openGL? And as a side note...
I didn't find an explicit answer to this question in the WiX Documentation (or Google, for that matter). Of course I could just write the appropriate registry keys in HKCR, but it makes me feel dirty and I'd expect this to be a standard task which should have a nice default solution. For bonus points, I'd like to know how to make it "sa...
I have a Windows Installer MSI package that installs drivers which sometimes require a restart before they can be upgraded; the drivers are installed by a deferred custom action after WriteRegistryValues. When a reboot IS needed there's a rollback and the user is told to reboot and run the install again. In the InstallExecuteSequence ...
I have an install that upgrades a previous version of an app if it exits. I'd like to skip certain actions when the install is upgrade mode. How can I determine if the install is running in upgrade mode vs. first time install mode? I'm using Wise Installer, but I don't think that matters. I'm assuming that Windows Installer has a proper...
I'm using Windows Installer 4.5 new features and Wix to generate msi packages. What I have done is created a msi chain instalation in order to install a collection of other msi packages as a transaction. Each package is using the new Embedded UI option so the Ui can be WPF. Everything works ok this far. Except one of the goals would be ...