WixFirewallExtension is a new WiX extension that lets you configure the Windows Firewall from your program’s installer. Windows has had a built-in firewall since Windows XP was released in 2001, though it was XP’s Service Pack 2 that introduced a firewall of sufficient power for most people to use it. (It helps that in SP2, [...]
The feedback was quick and consistent: Marking files vital by default is a good thing. So in the next weekly release of WiX, files will get the msidbFileAttributesVital attribute by default. The FilesVitalByDefault property and -fdvital switch have been removed; in their place, SuppressFilesVitalByDefault and -sfdvital turn off the default “vital” behavior.
The msidbFileAttributesVital File attribute bit says to Windows Installer that the file is vital to the operation of the installation and if it can’t be installed, the installation should fail. In an installation showing user interface, if a file can’t be installed, MSI shows a dialog box to let the user retry, ignore, or cancel [...]
The Game Explorer is a new feature in Windows Vista to collect and richly present installed games. Game Explorer is a shell folder that includes detailed information about each game, including box art, content ratings (and parental-control restrictions based on them), and performance requirements (using the Vista performance rating system). Most of the details shown [...]
For flexibility at deployment time, MSI uses the value of the ALLUSERS property in determining the type of an installation—whether it’s per-machine or per-user. That lets a network administrator easily control whether the package’s shortcuts (for example) show up for all users or just one. There’s also the it-looks-good-at-first idea of ALLUSERS=2, which theoretically lets [...]