As some of you may have already heard, Windows 7 has now been released to manufacturing! Read the latest blog post on the Engineering Windows 7 blog. This also means that now you have all the more reason to try the new functionality in Windows Installer 5.0 that is included in Windows 7. Windows Installer provides some key improvements and enables new experiences for application setup developers, ISVs and IT Administrators. Also all features provided with the MSI 4.5 redistributable release are rolled into Windows 7.

You can download the recorded presentation [video1, video2, video3] & the power point slide deck to learn more about these Windows Installer features.

 Improvements over Windows Vista:

  • Standard actions support for enhanced permissions setting, service configuration and most common UI oriented tasks, eliminating the need for writing custom actions
  • Performance related improvements give you the ability to speed up installation of large packages & patches, and better integration with UAC help provide a good overall end user experience
  • Patching improvements made to support highest version of shared component, and support custom action during patch uninstall

New experiences in Windows 7:

  • Support for installing multiple packages using transaction processing
  • Support to embed a custom UI handler within MSI package, making custom UI easier to integrate
  • Support to create & deploy a single dual mode MSI package capable of being installed both in per-user as well as per-machine context

Please note that the MSDN documentation section "What's new in Windows Installer 5.0" has been updated accordingly and is available for online viewing. Feel free to post your comments/questions to this blog post.

 [Author: Zainab Hakim]
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