Packaging

Custom actions play an very prominent role in getting the Developer's task done easily. The Microsoft Windows Installer provides many built-in custom actions for performing the installation process. The standard actions can also be defined as a part of the packaging template. Standard actions are sufficient to execute an installation in most cases. However, there are situations where the developer of an installation package finds it necessary to write a custom action. The Custom Actions are the actions entirely defined by the users i.e. the developer writes an action to execute his own installation. This is basically written to achieve few tasks which are not possible through the MSI.

The Installer uses GUIDs to uniquely identify applications, packages, features, etc. The ProductID is the GUID used by the Installer to distinguish one application from another.

It doesn’t matter if the package or application names for two different applications are different, if the IDs are the same, the Installer is likely to become confused and you will encounter problems with installation, repair and uninstall.

Is English not your first language? Maybe your users would prefer to use some other language. You can make that change and simply use the SystemLanguageID property to change the default in your system. Follow the below steps in your WSI package:

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.

I've been doing a lot of work on AutoCAD and Inventor 2009 this past week and I kept on hitting a side-by-side error when I tried to export from XP to Vista or Vista to Vista (curiously it worked from XP to XP.) After some work I've found what the problem is and thought I'd share this since I've seen people in the past asking bout side-by-side errors.

I have seen a lot of Juice Articles about creating, editing, and modifying MSI installers. But I have not seen one that explains how to use Wise SetupCapture to capture an install of any application, or any change to a computer for that matter, into an MSI installer. If you have Deployment Server, you have Wise SetupCapture in the Wise folder of your eXpress share. I have written this short article as a quick start guide to using Wise SetupCapture.