New/old lead program manager Tyler Robinson has a session at PDC to discuss the new features in Windows Installer and ClickOnce in Windows 7:
If you are a developer involved in the creation of application deployment packages using Windows Installer (MSI) or ClickOnce, this session is for you. Learn how you can take advantage of new [...]
Major upgrades work across products by associating them with a single upgrade code: Version 1.0 of a product has a different product code than version 2.0 but both share the same upgrade code. The FindRelatedProducts action and MsiEnumRelatedProducts function find any products on the system with a particular upgrade code. The RemoveExistingProducts action then uninstalls [...]
Google today released (after a bit of a comic-book pre-release, presumably due to the Labor Day holiday in the US) Google Chrome, its long-rumored open-source browser. Plenty of people will talk (endlessly) about the implications of another browser and how well Google Chrome and Chromium (the open source project) do the job. Blah, blah. Whatever. What’s [...]
When you include deferred custom actions — that somehow modify the machine — in your setup, you have two big responsibilities:
Provide rollback custom actions that "undo" what the deferred CAs do so that the installation transaction is actually transactional.
Test.
Test.
Test.
OK, so numbers 2 through 4 are kinda the same but not really: [...]
As I mentioned previously, one of my favorite examples of a tight, clean Windows Installer package for a real product–VirtualBox–succumbed to a dreaded VBScript custom action when they released v1.6.0. Predictably, it caused errors (during uninstallation, because this custom action ran during uninstall only).
VirtualBox 1.6.2 dropped that custom action. The VirtualBox installers still have a [...]