Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
February 27, 2006Feb 27, 200602/27/06I’ve been writing a number of helpful tools at work such as a tool to extract transforms and cabinets from a patch and wasn’t satisfied relying on the file extension to identify a patch, or other Windows Installer file types for that matter.
February 27, 2006Feb 27, 200602/27/06As you might have noticed from various posts on my blog I love understanding how things work. When I started learning the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 I delved into intermediate language (IL) for most of the assemblies and learned about the hosting interfaces.
February 21, 2006Feb 21, 200602/21/06Installing a patch will often mean that files are to be updated, though patching isn’t limited or even required to just patch files. Starting with Windows Installer 3.0 you can find the final sequence of patches to be installed or reinstalled in a verbose log file similar to the following:
MSI (c) (8C:C4) [14:27:53:319]: Final Patch Application Order:MSI (c) (8C:C4) [14:27:53:319]: {3DB7C93B-AA16-49E8-9D9E-D427F2C5DDEB}MSI (c) (8C:C4) [14:27:53:319]: {685E109C-738F-4575-B1FA-CF645F3611F0} –
February 16, 2006Feb 16, 200602/16/06I respond to a lot of questions answered on an internal alias for Windows
Installer support, some of which inspire posts on my blog. That alias is also
archived in a public folder on our corporate
Exchange server so there is a vast
treasure trove of information for reading –
February 14, 2006Feb 14, 200602/14/06From the mailbag, someone asked how to extract files from a patch. Now
presumably one would want to extract the files as they apply to a product if the
patch were installed but I will cover both ways because one can lead to the
other.
February 8, 2006Feb 8, 200602/8/06I’m a big fan of extensibility, which is why I was excited to see in a recent blog post on the IE Blog about OpenSearch discovery using <link/> elements. OpenSearch is a collection of XML schemas and extensions to RSS that enables clients like Internet Explorer to interact with search results in order to discover,
February 7, 2006Feb 7, 200602/7/06Notice the differences between the following two dialogs from the same Windows Installer package on the same Windows XP machine.
The first dialog is displayed when launching a sample .msi file using the msiwai.exe program I detailed before. The second dialog is displayed when the sample .msi file is launched from Windows Explorer,
February 1, 2006Feb 1, 200602/1/06Microsoft Windows provides a lot of base services on which applications can
be written, but there are differences between all the various editions of
Windows. While it’s far more common to have a minimum dependency on a particular
platform, cases may arise where an application may require,
February 1, 2006Feb 1, 200602/1/06A reader who happened across my post on
Windows
Installer on 64-bit Platforms
mentioned a problem with running 64-bit managed custom actions using the
Visual Studio 2005 Windows Installer project. This also recently cropped up in
an internal discussion alias.
The issue is that if you build a managed class library project targeting a 64-bit platform
using /platform:x64 or /platform:Itanium and install a
Windows Installer package built in Visual Studio 2005 on a
64-bit machine a
System.BadImageFormatException is thrown.
