Serviceability Archives

A patch may take as long or longer to install than the target product

February 20, 2011 Feb 20, 2011 02/20/11

Heath Stewart

Often I’m asked why installing a Windows Installer patch (MSP) takes as long or longer to install than the target product (MSI). While this isn’t always the case for every patch, it’s certainly possible for a number of reasons. It may also come as a surprise that the size of the patch can have little to do with the time to ...

Downgrading Shared Components

September 8, 2010 Sep 8, 2010 09/8/10

Heath Stewart

Shared components define shared resources. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to understand that whatever you do to a shared resource during the installation of one product affects those same resources for any other product. For example, when upgrading one product to update files shared with another product, that other product ...

Major Upgrades with Shared Components

April 9, 2010 Apr 9, 2010 04/9/10

Heath Stewart

Major upgrades are Windows Installer products that can be installed like any other product with the added benefit of removing one ore more related products. For example, version 2 of a product can be installed on a clean machine, or on a machine with version 1 already installed and will remove version 1.When another version of a product is ...

Testing for components that install under TARGETDIR

February 26, 2010 Feb 26, 2010 02/26/10

Heath Stewart

A while back I explained how Windows Installer sets the TARGETDIR property to the root of the fixed drive with the most free space available. The problem is that even an attached USB external drive can appear as a fixed drive, and these may be later detached. If components are installed to that drive and the drive is detached, repairing, ...

Test your conditions

February 15, 2010 Feb 15, 2010 02/15/10

Heath Stewart

When testing the serviceability of your product before you ship, it’s important to test any conditions you might have on the product, features, components, and actions.Feature conditions can set the install level of a feature when the package is installed. But as the Condition table documentation states, be sure that the condition does ...

Serviceability

February 14, 2010 Feb 14, 2010 02/14/10

Heath Stewart

It’s always important to test your product before it ships. Servicing it later can prove very costly and very difficult. It’s no different with your installation packages. You need to test not only basic install and uninstall operations, but also test your servicing plan. Problems are inevitable in practically any application, and ...

Visual Studio Setup