Making an MSI that doesn't need a UAC/LUA prompt

re: Making an MSI that doesn't need a UAC/LUA prompt

windowsmarketplace — Fri, 04 May 2007 13:29:13 GMT

James, why do you use msiinfo instead of the Package/@InstallPrivileges attribute to set the elevation flags in the MSI?

Also, if you look at a <a href="http://wix.sourceforge.net/clickthrough.html">ClickThrough</a> in the WiX toolset, you can see a much more elegant way of switching from per-machine to per-user without duplicating all of your authoring.

re: Making an MSI that doesn't need a UAC/LUA prompt

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 05 May 2007 01:51:29 GMT

@windowsmarketplace

InstallPrivileges certainly works - I was using a few different versions of Wix and some of them (some of the 3.0 stuff, IIRC) didn't support it. msiinfo is just something I used because it was always supported.

ClickThrough - ignorance, really. I tried to look at it and give it a run, but I really don't understand how it all connects together and the limitations. Maybe you'd be interested in doing lunch?

Link to an article describing how to create an MSI that does not prompt for elevation

Aaron Stebner's WebLog — Sat, 05 May 2007 05:10:56 GMT

As I previously described in this blog post , Windows Installer will prompt users for elevation by default

re: Making an MSI that doesn't need a UAC/LUA prompt

Pankaj — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:43:42 GMT

James,

I am currently writing a WiX installer that needs to do both single-user and all-user installs, and I followed the scheme you described above.

However, I find that this doubled the size of the installer, because it is now carrying around two compressed copies of the same executable.

Is there any way to get around that?

Also, is LocalAppDataDir the canonical place for a single-user install?

Thanks,

Pankaj

re: Making an MSI that doesn't need a UAC/LUA prompt

jamesfinnigan — Wed, 30 May 2007 22:48:04 GMT

@Pankaj

Well, a few comments first - one point of this blog entry is to talk about the issues with a single-package per-machine/per-user setup. You should follow the best practice unless you're happy with the issues that I mentioned here.

If those don't bother your scenario, then you can do the work (mentioned super briefly in the footnote) to change the installdir on the components and make the removedir/HKCU keypath stuff be conditional on ALLUSERS, or you can simply use the latest v3 version of wix (it has a feature that reuses compression of duplicate files - the file will have 2 entries in your cab, but only take up space once).

I don't think that there is a canonical place for a single-user (and LUA-free) install yet.

HTH,

James

http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/archive/2007/05/04/2419593.aspx

TrackBack — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 03:11:16 GMT