Installation and containerization of the Visual Studio family of products
November 30, 2007Nov 30, 200711/30/07People commonly ask me what to start reading to learn about Windows Installer. Internally I point people to a wiki I maintain with lots of links to various sources, and some of those links are to my own blog posts. Externally I typically link to all these same sources,
November 26, 2007Nov 26, 200711/26/07No doubt you’ve heard the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 was released. Aaron Stebner has posted a list of links to 3.5, as well as 2.0 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and 3.0 SP1. It’s important to note that if you install 3.5 you’re actually getting 2.0 SP1 and 3.0 SP1 both.
November 20, 2007Nov 20, 200711/20/07Microsoft Visual Studio 2008, now available for MSDN subscribers and Express editions freely available to everyone, is a huge application. It takes a while to install and, in the case of Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, a long time to patch.
November 6, 2007Nov 6, 200711/6/07The Application Compatibility (AppCompat) platform in Windows is a powerful feature that allows for fixes on practically any program or package to be loaded on Windows. Windows Installer takes advantage of a protected database full of fixes in the form of transforms and custom action shims.
November 6, 2007Nov 6, 200711/6/07File versions in Windows Installer and properties like REINSTALL and REINSTALLMODE determine what files are copied to their destination. But before files versions are even a factor, any patches being installed or already installed are sequenced first.
A Windows Installer patch file,
November 3, 2007Nov 3, 200711/3/07Extracts data as XML from a shim database used for application compatibility. Please leave feedback on the tool here on this page.
This was developed using what little public documentation is available on MSDN as well as some experimentation at other functions that were exported from apphelp.dll,
November 1, 2007Nov 1, 200711/1/07In many languages, some variables can take a value of different types but with the same meaning. Variants in script, for example, can take 0 or false; or they can take any non-zero value and true. The following JScript example prints “Same”.
