It's well documented and understood that package codes should be unique for product and patch packages. The package code, also referred to as a patch code for .msp files, is a unique identifier for that package. For patches, the patch code may also be used for obsolescence, where patch codes for patches to be obsolesced are entered into the Revisio...

Windows Installer is a powerful yet complex technology. There are a lot of rules that have to be followed to be able to successfully install, maintain, and uninstall your product and to retain the functionality and tidy clean-up capabilities of Windows Installer. To this end, Internal Consistency Evaluators (ICEs) exist to aid in validating that yo...

The File table in a Windows Installer package has a Sequence column that begins with 1. Besides determining in what order files are to be installed, this column serves another, relatively more important function: determining where the source files are located.In concert with the Media table, a range of sequence numbers identify in which cabinet - ...

I’ve been using primarily Microsoft FrontPage 2003 to author blogs because, like many people, even the reduced HTML output of Word 2003 and older wasn’t clean and tidy and was often difficult to stylize in CSS. This also made it a pain to copy and paste code samples from Visual Studio into Word in order to get HTML to then paste in my b...

One nice thing about managed applications is the push for touch-free application deployment. Paint.NET is a perfect example of a relatively powerful application that can simply be copied to any machine with the required .NET Framework version installed and then executed. With the recent release of Paint.NET v2.62 I wanted to take advantage of touch...

The first update that Palm provided for the Treo 700w wasn't available for long. Soon after I posted about at least one problem with the installation process the update was pulled.I have been informed that the updater is back up and, looking in the downloaded .zip file I see that the ® and ™ symbols have been removed from the file name.Ac...

I'm been using the Windows RSS Platform provided for down-level systems with Internet Explorer 7 for a while, but every so often a few blog posts from our MSDN aggregated feed contain markup or links that cause problems, such as absolute-positioned s and image sources on servers requiring authentication. I can't just unsubscribe to be rid of those...

Palm has released an update to address many of the problems I mentioned previously as well as other issues. While this update is to address problems with the Treo 700w, the update itself had several problems.The first problem I encountered and likely many others will is that when you run setup.exe per instructions you might see a dialog like the on...

Installing a Windows Installer product package requires a certain amount of space on disk, even if all the installation is doing is running a custom action. Besides file costing and other actions typically sandwiched between the CostInitialize and CostFinalize standard actions, Windows Installer will require space under %WINDIR%Installer to cache t...

Last June before the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 shipped, I discussed how during administrative installations some 64-bit files overwrote some 32-bit files and I provided a transform to fix the issue. I filed a bug and the issue was fixed before .NET 2.0 shipped. Later in the release cycle the Office Crash Reporting Tool, otherwise known as the Mi...