In my seemingly never-ending quest to provide a simple, compact, yet stylish design for this blog I have recently made a customization based on what Josh Ledgard did sometime back to make collapsible panels, though I wanted something more easily reusable. I whipped together an ECMAScript — that is, ECMA-compliant JScript and JavaScript &...
Yesterday I blogged about what a patch file (.msp file) contains, as well as most other Windows Installer files. You might find, however, that some of the sample Windows Installer scripts in the Samples\SysMgmt\Msi\Scripts don't work with patch files. The reason is because you must pass (32) to the automation method. This corresponds to passing ...
Windows Installer relies on structured storage for information about the installation package and to store data used by the installation such as any Binary types and cabinet files. Patches (.msp files) are no different in structure but will contain different data. Up until Windows Installer 3.0, patches themselves didn't contain any standard tables...
Some people have noticed a general slow-down after restarting their computers after installing a .NET Framework 1.0 or 1.1, or a Visual Studio .NET 2002 or 2003 patch. This is due to a change in how post-reboot operations are handled that are sometimes necessary after installing a patch.Windows Installer automatically schedules files for replacemen...
To conclude the series of the problems with , we will extend the workaround to support setting to support Microsoft's lifecycle policy on support N and N-1, where N would be a service pack, and N-1 would be the previous service pack or the RTM.Since we've essentially already developed our own sequencing feature in order to keep patches in view at ...
In an effort to present to the community information about which you're interested, please suggest topics for future posts by adding your comments. While my job deals more with Windows Installer — more specifically setup and deployment of the .NET Framework, Visual Studio, and other Developer Division products — my other interests deal ...
Below is a list of articles I've written over the years. If you have ideas within the scope of Windows Installer, Microsoft .NET, COM, COM interoperability with .NET, or other related topics please add your comments to this post.
Continuing the series on the perils and necessity of , it's time to explain one solution for having your cake an eating it too.If you have determined that you need to define in your product RTM, remember that your product nor patches will not show up in the Add/Remove Programs (ARP) control panel unless you write entries for each to the registry y...
A question was asked in Aaron Stebner's blog about major upgrades via MSP patch files with sequencing information. I would like to take this opportunity — at Aaron's request — to explain a few guidelines regarding major upgrades in Windows Installer.Basically, a major upgrade is an update to a product that changes all of the , , and pac...
If you're using Windows Script to perform a lot of everyday functions or even need a one-use script to automate a batch process there's a great resource available on the web on our TechNet site: The Script Center Script Repository. There are hundreds of example scripts available from managing Active Directory to managing Office documents and applic...
