Articles, Application Packaging

Early this year I convinced my boss that I really needed to go to ManageFusion in Vegas. I made sure to build a very good case. I explained that we needed to learn more about Helpdesk Solution, Patch Management, Application Metering, Dell Client Manager, and more. I argued that if I were to learn more about these products I would be able to be more effective at work. Lucky for me, I was able to attend the confab. It honestly changed the way I manage computers.

When a Driver application gets installed on to a machine, it installs driver information like PNF, INF, CAT files in the location "C:\Windows\inf". By default, these files will be named as oemXX.pnf or oemXX.inf where XX stands for the number. Ex: oem1.INF, oem1.PNF and so on. So when we do a capture of such applications, these XX values will be hard coded which does affect many other device driver applications which are pre-existent in the machine. Hence, in this case we used to customize the package by writing few Custom actions using "setupapi.dll" in such a way that it checks for the max XX value which is present in the machine and install the PNF or INF file of the package.

A service pack (or SP) is a group of updates, hot fixes and/or enhancements to an application or an OS which was delivered by the company as a single installable package. A lot of companies, such as Microsoft, usually release a service pack when the total number of individual patches released to a given program reaches a definite limit. Installing a service pack is less prone to error and easier to install on a large number of computers individually, even more so when updating multiple computers over a network.

There are many reasons you might want to convert your existing and forthcoming application installs to use NullSoft Install System (NSIS). NSIS installs are only a single .exe file, they are small, and they are fast.

Many of us have built an Office 2007 package that helps out greatly on SVS machines. Many of us, like myself, are building professional packages for customers and from every customer we get the question: "Can you build Office 2007 for us?"

An Installation Flow and Options document explains any user input required while running the installation of a legacy setup and testing of the prepackaged setup.

If you have been holding back on installing Office 2007, you will most likely be installing Office 2007 on a multitude of systems. If you have already created a distribution method for Office 2007, turn around, do not pass go, this document is not for you. If you have not undertaken this journey yet, hold on to your pants and continue reading. The goal of this document is to help you achieve a comfort level that will take you into the advanced features of creating a silent installation, without you having to step into the same pot holes as I did. Please comment on this document in order to make future documents even better.

Windows supports the use of shared libraries, usually DLLs and OCXs, to reduce memory and disk-space requirements for applications, and to help developers with modular application development. However, when many applications are installed on a system, using shared libraries can lead to application instability. Common problems include the following:

The following sections describe some basic concepts and terminology you will encounter when working with windows installer (MSI) installation programs.

Environment variables are strings that contain information such as drive, path, or file name. They control the behavior of various programs.