This is the first in a series of Best Practice Guidelines for Building Quality Installs . Let's start with the basics of quality Windows Installer (MSI) package. Prior postings the series: Introduction . Build Components According to Component Rules...

With the start of the Profesional Developers Conference 2005 , the Windows Installer Team is starting a series of Best Practice Guidelines for Building Quality Installs . Windows Installer (MSI) is a rich engine with many features to solve installation...

Question How should I determine the success or failure of a Windows Installer install? Answer Generally there are two ways of invoking Windows Installer, a MSIExec command line call or an MSI API (MsiInstallProduct, MsiInstallProductEx, MsiReinstallProduct...

Question How do I get a deep view of what Windows Installer is doing? Answer One of the comments I got from the PDC was that the SDK documentation and commercial tools lacked sufficient depth if one really wanted to figure out what was going on...

Question Why can't I patch or uninstall a component without a ComponentId? Answer Check the Windows Installer documentation on Component Table : ComponentId A string GUID unique to this component, version, and language. Note that the letters...

Question Any clues to why we're seeing Error code 1912: Could not unregister type library for [file]? Answer The error comes from the typelibrary API -- so it's what's having an issue. From the log file: MSI (s) (84:FC) [11:44:22:589]: Executing...

To acquire background on Versioning and Component Rules, we recommend Rob Mensching's Background blogs Component Rules 101 Windows Installer Components Introduction. Component Rules The following MSDN topics help folks understand the components...

Here are a set of frequent and infrequent questions around Windows Installer's reboot behavior Question What happens if the user reboots their machine during an installation? Answer This is called a suspended installation. If you’ll search the...

Question How do I find all the Windows Installer packages installed on my machine? Answer Here’s the APIs and the Properties one would need MsiEnumProducts(DWORD,LPTSTR) function [Windows Installer] MsiEnumProductsEx (8 Parameters) function...

Question What are the upper limits of the CAB file format? Answer The only compressed file type supported natively by Windows Installer is the Cabinet (CAB) format . Multi-part CABs can get the total size of a set of files past 2GB, possibly...

Question How do I lookup the error text associated with a given error code return from msiexec or MsiInstallProduct? Answer MsiExec returns system error codes so FormatMessage is available to obtain the message text. Related references ...

Question How do I read an environment variable into the MSI? Answer Check out the MSDN topic Restrictions on Property Names [Windows Installer] which says Property names prefixed with % represent system and user environment variables. Check...

Hello everyone, Just a reminder that Tyler Robinson and Jamie Cool will be speaking about software installation on Windows Vista and what cool new features we have in store for the next release of the Windows Installer here at the PDC. FUN222 -...

Question How to get file's compressed size inside an msi? Answer Windows Installer SDK tools like PatchWiz.dll and WiMakCab.vbs with msifiler.exe will compress files into a cabinet ( .cab ) file either separate or added as a sub- storage of the...

Question Is it guaranteed that the external user-interface handler gets called by the Installer in the same thread that calling InstallProduct? Answer No, in fact they will come from different threads. Content credit also belongs to ...

Questions MSP Patch detection questions from a MSI newbie: Is there any API which directly consumes the Patch XML Blob and intimates if it is applicable/Installed on the target system as the whole set of information is already available in the XML...

Rob and I had an uneventful Alaska Air flight from SeaTac to LAX. We've picked up car from Avis (well, a minivan) and then were off to the Biltmore. Dropped our bags, walked a dozen L.A. blocks to the Conference Center and grabbed a quick lunch. As...

Question Any tips on getting the cancel button working for a deferred custom action ? During our MSI uninstallation (full GUI mode), at the beginning of the uninstallation we call a deferred CA. When this CA is executing, if the user clicks the...

To those that have been posting comments as Anonymous, I apologize for the fact they had not been making their way through to the blog entries. I had the "Moderate comments by Anonymous users only" switch flipped but did not realize that meant I needed...

Question How to disable advertising? One of the requirements that I've been given is disable Advertise for our product. I'm supposed to implement a "Advertise is not supported" dialog that is displayed when the user tries to install with ACTION...

Question Any pointers for troubleshooting 2737 Could not access custom action [2], entry [3], library [4] Available in Windows Installer versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2.? Answer First, start with the Windows Installer Error Messages reference as you...

Los Angeles here we come! Tyler's speaking at FUN222 - Windows Vista: What’s New in Software Installation for Windows Vista: Exploring the Windows Installer (MSI) and ClickOnce Options in room 406 AB on Friday the 16th at 1pm . Robert's signed up...

I have been with the Windows Installer team (i.e. MSI Team) for three years now. During this time I helped the team ship XPSP2 (MSI 3.0), 2003 SP1 (MSI 3.1) and now Vista (MSI 4.0). It has been a rewarding experience working with this dev team. When...

Question How do detect the MSI version on the computer? Answer Tyler mentioned the following in his blog entry Windows Installer 3.1 Version Confusion If you want to check the version of the Windows Installer on your system, check the version...

Problem I'm trying to import UTF8 encoded IDT files to make a UTF8 code page MSI but the import is failing. Can you help me troubleshoot? Solution Reviewing the SDK, the topics ASCII Data in Text Archive Files and Archive File Format are not entirely...