Setup Sense and Sensibility

This is the seventh in a series of notes about UAC in MSI. Per the earlier caveat , these are just my notes and not an official position from the Windows Installer team . The previous entries Introduced... ...the UAC in MSI Notes series ...

This is the sixth in a series of notes about UAC in MSI. Per the earlier caveat , these are just my notes and not an official position from the Windows Installer team . The previous entries, I Introduced the series Introduced my view of the root...

This is the fifth in a series of notes about UAC in MSI. Per the earlier caveat , these are just my notes and not an official position from the Windows Installer team . The previous entries, I Introduced the series Introduced my view of the root...

This is the forth in a series of notes about UAC in MSI. Per the earlier caveat , these are just my notes and not an official position from the Windows Installer team . The previous entries, I Introduced the series Introduced my view of the root...

This is the third in a series of notes about UAC in MSI. Per the earlier caveat , these are just my notes and not an official position from the Windows Installer team . The previous entries introduced the series , and introduced my view of the root problem...

This is the second in a series of notes about UAC in MSI. Per the earlier caveat , these are just my notes and not an official position from the Windows Installer team . The previous entry was the introduction to the series . This entry will talk about...

As Windows Installer feature PM, one of my responsibilities was to work on the Windows Installer 's User Account Control support. Over the last year, I've collected a bunch of notes on stuff people ask me about but did not fit neatly into our SDK . Despite...

Office Sr VP Steve Sinofski blogged about Bureaucracy: good? bad? both? . I like to think that two examples of how Office invests in helpful process are Windows Installer ( technology ) and Windows Installer XML (authoring language, built largely by...

On the 30th of August, Tom Friedman came campus to talk about his book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman . I don't read a lot (due to time) but this was a book I knew I needed to read. There are two things...

After PDC 2005 and TechEd 2005 I can say conventions are a lot harder than I had imagined. The best and the worst thing are that customers that know my technology come up to me and tell me what's wrong with it. This is great because I know people care...

After some concerted efforts with Jason , Shared Source Initiative director, the powers that be of the PDC 2005 granted a Shared Source table at the Ask The Experts session. Due to scheduling and resource constraints, we're only going to be able to...

As I'm looking at traveling to LA in the early AM, here's hoping I do better traveling to PDC 05 than I did to TechEd 05. My first convention was TechEd 2005 which I attended shortly after I joined the Windows Installer team as a new PM . I'd like...

RFC Review Question What's the moral difference between using a preprocessor extension, and extending the preprocessor? WiX Engineering Principles Well not a moral difference but a difference in engineering principles and trade-offs. Root...

Microsoft Pokes Fun At Its 'Evil Empire' Rep My favorite benevolent dictator is the storm trooper in the middle of the picture .

Inquiring minds have discovered that for some reason the Windows Installer service goes on for about 10 minutes and asked 'what that heck?'. Yes, it is by design that the Windows Installer service will remain running after the install. If there are...

If you were in the prerelease program of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1, then please be sure to remove the prerelease from your system before resuming normal computation. It was pointed out that this uninstall clause in the RTM Readme , "Before You...

Windows and other vendors are growing our security messages to include advice on improving the security of your existing systems. Some of the guidance includes the messages that services that run as Local System unnescicarily it increase the potential...

If you see MSI log entry Custom Action Server rejected - Wrong Context. logged during installs on 64 bit platforms, you may have an incorrectly registered custom action server. This log entry will be preceeded by the log entry Hello, I'm your 64bit Elevated...

No additional work is required by an application installed with Windows Installer as MSI tells system restore when to start and when to stop monitoring. Here's an example of a log entry for the system restore start (uninstalling orca.msi from the SDK...

Windows Installer Error Messages [Windows Installer] describes the standard and debug errors from the Windows Installer engine. Error Table [Windows Installer] describes how a package can customize the these standard and debug error messages. The Error...

When applying a second patch, error 1328 “file is modified by other means” can occur when the second patch did not obsolete the first patch. Please review Creating a Small Update Patch [Windows Installer] and property ListOfPatchGUIDsToReplace at Properties...

Windows Installer writes Add/Remove Programs with the RegisterProduct Action [Windows Installer] . For which portions of ARP MSI supports, please review the existing Configuring Add/Remove Programs with Windows Installer [Windows Installer] . If there...

When Windows Installer logs the InstallValidate Action , the MSI engine reports the three states of a the componets and features in the product. For example, the following report says a component current state is absent, the user requested the component...

When one starts working with transforms , whether for patching or for administration , digging in a bit further may be useful to solve the problems at hand. If this is you, here's some frequently asked questions Q: What tools are available to build...

When folks start using upgrades with the Windows Installer the question 'where's my upgrade log?' quickly follows. Here are some initial details to upgrade logging Q: Where is my upgrade log? A: The upgrade logging is added to the log of the enclosing...