No, this isn’t a post on the costs of proprietary software but an amplification/clarification to my previous post. On wix-users, there’s a thread on the pains of automating upgrades.
If your product consists of a large number of files and the file set changes regularly – files being added and removed during the product lifetime – [...]
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master – that’s all.’
–Alice’s Adventures [...]
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: [...]