I am often asked why file changes don't appear in the handy Windows Installer tool, Orca. When people open an .msp patch package in Orca, they will likely see something like the following: As described in What's in a Patch, a patch package contains transforms and, optionally, tables. Currently, Windows Installer-supported tables include the MsiPa...
Yesterday, the Microsoft .NET 3.0 Framework was released. This is comprised of the .NET Framework 2.0 plus Windows Workflow Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, and the Windows Communication Foundation. This release is intended to increase the scope of the original base class library, so while the 2.0 BCL is included this whole release is 3...
I recently added the Live Search Box to my blog, as you can see in the top right corner. This handy AJAX-enabled control allows you to use Live Search's powerful features, and to search other Windows Installer sites using a macro I created a while back. You can see the result in the screenshot below, or - better yet - just give it a try. It works i...
Language support in Windows Installer can be confusing until you understand how Windows Installer queries for and uses languages. Some wonder why Windows Installer packages have two different places to set the language. Some wonder why, for example, localized packages install using a different language than the user's default UI language. Some of t...
Because some of the custom actions in Visual Studio 2005 are authored to impersonate the non-privileged token of the invoking user on Vista, a mitigation has been checked in for the patch wrapper that is used to add additional compression for the patch and to patch multiple products, if present, without rebooting in between. The native wrapper isn'...
In The NoImpersonate Bit Mistake, Robert Flaming of the Windows Installer team discusses how some custom actions may fail because they impersonate the non-privileged client token and won't be able to perform some actions. Such a scenario is described in Custom Actions under UAC on Vista. For administrative users on Vista, a client token would typic...
Effective immediately, I am changing comment options on this blog to only allow comments for posts made within the last 60 days. Like Sara and most – if not all – other bloggers on this site, I get a lot of comment spam and it takes too much time to wade through, and in the past I've accidentally deleted a couple of comments or question...
Some customers are reporting that Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta tries to install multiple times. There are a couple of actions that can reproduce this issue. First, because the SP1 patch is so large, it takes a while for wrapper to extract it. You can verify this by watching the working memory set increase in the task manager. Without any ...
Quite a few beta customers have reported that the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta install requires a lot of space. This is by design a feature of Windows Installer. The amount of space required to install the patch can be reduced but a lot of space is still consumed after the patch is installed. Patches are cached in whole because when addit...
One of the most-reported feedback issues with Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta is about how long it takes to install. There are, unfortunately, a couple things that account for this and currently nothing we can do to prevent them. We have been considering options to at least inform the users what to expect when installing VS 2005 SP1, and I c...
