Windows Installer Team Blog

Question I am seeing a very strange issue with patches on msi 2.0, our patches seem to work fine, yet none of the files on the disk are replaced. I tried regenerating the patches with the 2.0 toolset , but that did not help. Answer For MSI20...

MSI MVP Stefan Krueger posted a excellent response to the question "What are the limits for a large MSI package?" in a FAQ entry at InstallSite.org Thanks for the hard work Stefan ;^)

Hello OpenOffice.org, I see on the 2.0 RC1 site , there the following statement ** NOTE: For right now, Windows user will have to remove older Beta and developer builds prior to the installation of the RC because of an incorrect interpretation...

Last night, I posted an open question about the MSI's incorrect interpretation of the OpenOffice.org RC install. Friendly Brant Gurganus offered me a link into the OpenOffice.org qa database (thanks Brant ;^). Here's what I can offer to help ...

Question Most frequent problem with the msi-fusion interaction? Answer Incorrect authoring of strong name. This particularly crops up at uninstall time as the MSIAssemblyName table ends up feeding the wrong identity to the Fusion API. This doesn...

Context: Glimpse at an internal thread where Technical Evangelists were asking about Affects of a Vista Upgrade on Existing Application Installs Question 1 : What will happen to the installed programs at the time of OS upgrade? Will the user be able...

The other day a user complained that they were trying to donfigure Active Directory and their queries were intermittently getting access denied. They had roughly identified the problem as having been related to the Windows 2003 server SP1 however they...

As part of the ongoing MSDN Communities effort, the Windows Installer team is pleased to announce the next chat in the Windows Installer series. Members of the Windows Installer team at Microsoft will be available to answer questions about any MSI topic...

Context : Every week the dedicated Windows Installer (MSI) resources of Product Support Services (PSS) and members of the MSI team have a conference call to discuss PSS issues of the week including ones that may result in Requests For Change (RFC). Instance...

An change to the Service Control APIs produced a MSI 3.0 behavior change. Before Before XP SP2 and MSI 3.0 the Service Control APIs used to send us a shutdown message and we’d ignore it and continue to run without telling the Service Control APIs that...

We've got a couple of pings on a billboard bug that I thought I'd share in case others are seeing this problem. Problem In Windows Installer 2 billboards showed one after another smoothly during InstallFiles action. With Windows Installer version...

Question How do I merge an MSM with a nested MSI in it's substorage into a MSI? Answer This isn't really possible given the current merge tools since they don't handle movement of substorages from the MSM to the MSI. Content credit also...

Scenario On Windows XP, I am advertising an MSI that has ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT set to 1 but it appears in ARP anyway. Is this by design? Is there a workaround Indeed, once I fault in the product, the ARP entry goes away. There’s not much to see in...

Question Can you help troubleshooting 'Error 2902. Operation ixfAssemblyCopy called out of sequence.'? Answer The 2902 errors generally point to authoring issues. One case has been identified as authoring error wherein the win32 sxs components do not...

Question How do I get the Escape key to work on a Windows Installer dialog? Answer Edit the Dialog table , go to the record that contains the dialog and enter your No/Cancel button's key (Name field in Control table ) into the Control_Cancel...

Hello everyone, Just a note that all of the PDC content is now available for download. If you missed the Windows Installer / ClickOnce session at the PDC (FUN222) now is a great opportunity to get caught up! Check out this blog posting for more information...