Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
March 31, 2006Mar 31, 200603/31/06If you want to open a .msp file with the Windows Installer APIs, you must pass MSIDBOPEN_PATCHFILE to the MsiOpenDatabase function, or ERROR_OPEN_FAILED (110) is returned. Below is the definition of both MSIDBOPEN_PATCHFILE and MSIDBOPEN_READONLY from msiquery.h in the Windows Installer SDK.
March 29, 2006Mar 29, 200603/29/06I
previously mentioned some problems I was having with the
Palm Treo 700w
and that these were not isolated issues. After several calls and more research I
have a few updates.
A lot of referrals came in from a
thread
about the SMS text messaging issue for the Palm Treo 700w on the Verizon
network.
March 27, 2006Mar 27, 200603/27/06Code pages describe a character set. In MSI Databases and Code Pages I described how Windows Installer databases use a code page for the string pool, as well that the summary information stream uses its own code page in PID_CODEPAGE (1) to describe strings in the summary information stream.
March 26, 2006Mar 26, 200603/26/06I bought a Palm Treo 700w a short while ago and for the most part have been loving it. It combines Palm’s great hardware with Microsoft Windows Mobile programming and great user interface. All this hasn’t been without its problems, though.
March 24, 2006Mar 24, 200603/24/06Windows Installer has the ability to create
administrative installations,
which is a copy of the .msi database and files that have been expanded into a source
directory structure. These administrative installations can easily be deployed
using Active Directory group policy deployment among other things,
March 21, 2006Mar 21, 200603/21/06A frequently asked question is about why property values in the Property table aren’t formatted when the values contain properties themselves, such as:
[ProductName] is copyright by [Manufacturer].
The reason these property values aren’t formatted is because the Value column type is simply Text,
March 15, 2006Mar 15, 200603/15/06I’ve been away for a while working on a high priority issue that I’ll discuss in detail soon, as well as investigating a common issue regarding 32- and 64-bit installations about which I’ll write a new series of posts. For much of that work I’ve been using Windows Installer XML,
