A common problem I see in various developer forums is trying to build an installation package with the Crystal Reports merge modules or running an application with Crystal Reports on another machine is that the registration code is often forgotten. You may see an error like the following on another machine where Crystal Reports has not been ...
A frequently asked question is how to detect whether a product installed using Windows Installer is being repaired, or a patch is being installed or — starting with Windows Installer 3.0 — uninstalled. The answer is detecting which properties are set.When a product — or even a single feature or multiple features — is being ...
Back in March I wrote about the dangers of using the and registry keys. This is another post to help you avoid some other pitfalls.The property in Windows Installer does not actually do anything directly to your installation — Windows Installer doesn't even check for it. What does happen, however, is that the Add/Remove Programs (ARP) ...
Many times it's necessary to debug solutions on other machines so that you don't corrupt your developer machine, because of different platform requirements, or to attach a debugger without changing the state of the machine. Testing Windows Installer patches is no different. We test on daily target builds using daily upgrade builds. Installing daily...
A few weeks ago the Windows Installer team started blogging. Over the course of last week Robert Flaming — now a PM for the Windows Installer team — posted a number of helpful troubleshooting tips that are generated in part from an internal discussion alias. Most teams within Microsoft use Windows Installer so the internal discussion ...
I previously mentioned how I worked on a project that deploys managed applications via the Internet or an intranet. Some of my initial research was into hosting managed controls in Internet Explorer. The .NET Framework 1.0 originally granted no permissions to the Internet_Zone code group so we had to deploy a small setup that used a custom class ...
QA uncovered a problem when testing our patches for .NET Framework 1.0 and 1.1 lately that will ship with an updated binary that now runs as a service under Windows NT platforms. The file version was incremented but in the log file we saw the following:MSI (s) (3F:2B): Executing op: FileCopy(SourceName=netfxupd.exe|netfxupdate.exe, SourceCabKey=...
A frequently-asked question is how to install an assembly into the Global Assembly Cache (GAC) and overwrite the old assembly that has the same strong name. This is known as in-place updating.The first answer is "don't". Besides being a trusted global store for managed assemblies that is intrinsic to assembly resolution, the GAC also ...
If you've tried to install the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 redistributable for either ia64 or x64 from an administrative installation point, you might've seen an error like the following: While investigating patching scenarios for 64-bit SKUs I found that for source extraction and administrative installs the 32- and 64-bit files map to the same ...
Last night the Windows Installer 3.1 redistributable was uploaded back onto the Microsoft Download Center. Version 2 of the redistributable addresses the issue where Windows Installer 3.1 would fail when trying to silently update a file under Windows File Protection...
