What's in a Patch

re: What's in a Patch

Nick Parker — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 05:12:32 GMT

Interesting, what client can you use to run a SQL expression against it?

re: What's in a Patch

Heath Stewart — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 05:26:35 GMT

The SQL - rather, SQL-like expressions - can be executed using the Windows Installer functions and automation interfaces, like Database.OpenView documented at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/msi/setup/database_openview.asp.

Many of the script under Samples\SysMgmt\Msi\Scripts in your Platform SDK installation directory like WiStream.vbs and WiSubStg.vbs will enumerate the _Streams and _Storages tables, respectively. They don't currently work for patches though, and I'll blog why later.

Updated Sample MSI Scripts

Heath Stewart's Blog — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 02:41:33 GMT

Changes the sample MSI scripts WiStream.vbs and WiSubStg.vbs to support patch files (.msp files).

How Patching Works

Heath Stewart's Blog — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 19:36:47 GMT

What patches do when being installed or uninstalled.

Extract Files from Patches

Heath Stewart's Blog — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 03:47:17 GMT

How to extract files from a patch by patching an administrative installation and the hard way using OLE structured storage APIs.

Determine Which Files are Being Patched

Heath Stewart's Blog — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 22:04:44 GMT

How to determine which files are being patched with a custom action.

Identifying Windows Installer File Types

Heath Stewart's Blog — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 19:58:48 GMT

How to identify different Windows Installer file types without relying on the file extension.

Patch Files Extractor

Heath Stewart's Blog — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 00:43:31 GMT

Download the source and a release binary for a tool to extract transforms and binary streams like cabinets from Windows Installer files, such as patches.

File Sequencing and How Files are Located

Heath Stewart's Blog — Fri, 19 May 2006 23:48:41 GMT

How file sequences identify the file source for installation, and how patches resolve source for new files.

Cumulative Service Packs with MinorUpdateTargetRTM

Heath Stewart's Blog — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 00:32:51 GMT

How to create cumulative service packs easily to apply with Windows Installer 3.1 and newer.

re: What's in a Patch

Gaurav — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 09:45:40 GMT

I want to extract a table from the MSP file and save it to a database, is this possible using C#

re: What's in a Patch

Heath Stewart — Tue, 18 Jul 2006 23:33:27 GMT

Gaurav, except the only two common tables - and currently the only two tables that mean anything to Windows Installer - are the MsiPatchMetadata and MsiPatchSequence tables. If you want to get the transforms to a table that the transforms within the patch make, you need to extract the right transform (search my blog for "extractor") and apply that to an open database handle to the target MSI.

Can C# do this? Of course, but you'll need to P/Invoke the MSI APIs.

re: What's in a Patch

Gaurav — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 10:00:32 GMT

Thanks Heath,
Let me put my issue more explicitly. I have an application wherein the user would upload his msi file along with some xml files (these would just contain some information regarding the dependencies etc). Now i have to extract these xml's from the msi and save it to the database, all using C#.

I am not sure how to approach this problem. Please enlighten.
I would appreciate if you can give me an exhaustive picture (i am new to msi's and C#).

THANKS IN ADVANCE.
Gaurav

re: What's in a Patch

Heath Stewart — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 19:57:44 GMT

Gaurav, comments in a blog are hardly the way to go into detail. I do wonder why you're using MSIs in this way. Are they used to install anything, or just as packaging? If you just need packaging, then use a ZIP file or some other archive format. .NET 2.0 even has supported for ZIP (well, LZ compressed streams - not ZIP file systems but that's not hard to build from what's provided).

If you just want to get the files out, again, see my patch file extractor at http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2006/04/07/571138.aspx. You could do much the same thing in C#, but you will have to P/Invoke the MSI APIs like MsiOpenDatabase, MsiDatabaseOpenView, MsiViewExecute, MsiViewFetch, and MsiRecordReadStream. In my msix.exe tool sample, look how I extract the CABs.

Once you get the CAB, you'll need something to expand them and I'm not aware of any libraries that do this currently, but you can use Process.Start to shell-out to some Platform SDK tool like cabarc.exe.

If you're going to shell out, though, just use Process.Start to call the following individually:

msiexec.exe /a <MSI file path> TARGETDIR="<target DIR>"

msiexec.exe /a "<target DIR>\<MSI file name>" /p "<patch path>"

Then you can get the files out of your patch.

Been Busy on Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Heath Stewart's Blog — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 21:26:54 GMT

I've been away for a while, though I've barely left the Microsoft campus. As we prepare for Visual Studio...

P/Invoke

Christopher Painter — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 19:47:11 GMT

Heath-

I've been converting some VBScript files to C# going from the session object to P/Invoke.

I have a script that walks an ArrayList and perfoms and update apx 1500 times on an MSI table using a function similar to WiRunSQL. What took seconds now takes 6 minutes. I split the function into 3 functions;

init ( MsiOpenDatabase )
exec ( create view, execute view, commit, closehandle view )
final ( close database handle

And now it takes 3 minutes to run. Is P/Invoke really that slow or am I doing something wrong? The only thing I can think to do next is pass the arraylist to a COM via interop and perform the updates there outside of the CLR.

re: What's in a Patch

Christopher Painter — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 19:47:36 GMT

The real cost seeme to be associated with the MsiDatabaseCommit call. Moving this to the finalization method really sped things up.

Size does Matter

Heath Stewart's Blog — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 02:22:08 GMT

In response to a previous post where I mentioned that work was being done on Visual Studio 2005 SP1,...

Size does Matter

Heath Stewart's Blog — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:09:04 GMT

In response to a previous post where I mentioned that work was being done on Visual Studio 2005 SP1,

Been Busy on Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Heath Stewart's Blog — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 04:09:14 GMT

I've been away for a while, though I've barely left the Microsoft campus. As we prepare for Visual Studio

Viewing Patches in Orca

Heath Stewart's Blog — Wed, 08 Nov 2006 03:11:23 GMT

I am often asked why file changes don't appear in the handy Windows Installer tool, Orca. When people

The Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Installation Experience

Heath Stewart's Blog — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 13:23:26 GMT

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 can take a long time to install and may apply to multiple products

Column Types Cannot be Changed in a Patch or Transform

Heath Stewart's Blog — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 20:19:29 GMT

Transforms can change just about anything in an installation package - even the code page. Transforms

Column Types Cannot be Changed in a Patch or Transform

Noticias externas — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 09:43:58 GMT

Transforms can change just about anything in an installation package - even the code page. Transforms