The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Leon Zandman — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:09:12 GMT

Interesting... Will you also publish the full source code for the project?

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Christopher Painter — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 17:55:21 GMT

Where is the documentation for this bootstrapper? The instructions only say to double click the file. ccsetup.exe doesn't yield any information to a /? command.

Systems Administrators need a way to extract the contents and run these installations silently and suppress reboots so that SMS can decide to do a reboot and manage the source resilency from distribution points.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

robmen — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:18:18 GMT

Leon, the focus thus far has been on getting this first release (Martha calls it a 0.9) out to the public. I will be discussing the internals of the setup on my blog and you will see the reusable parts of the install (like the Office detection logic, but not the graphics) being added to the WiX toolset over the next month or so.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

robmen — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 18:20:58 GMT

Chris, patience. Not everything was rolled into this very first release. Don't worry, all of the information necessary to do the enterprise wide deployments of this add-in is still in there. The ccsetup.exe itself doesn't support the scenario by itself.

I'll be discussing this in time as well.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Christopher Painter — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:29:36 GMT

Am I missing something? I'm looking at the PIA MSI and while I see an Appsearch called DetectOffice10 which uses a CompLocator search to find the Office InstallDir, the property it populates ( OFFICE10INSTALLED ) isn't used other then the LaunchCondition table.

The directory table entry "OfficeFolder" seems to be hard wired to Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10.

Will this work if Office has been installed somewhere else?

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

robmen — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 23:55:33 GMT

Chris, all of the PIA files are installed to the GAC. The directory the Components/Files go to doesn't really matter.

The DetectOffice10 CompLocator is used purely to determine if Office XP is installed on the machine at all. Arguably, INSTALLLOCATION should be set to OFFICE10INSTALLED but it doesn't really matter.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Frederik — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 02:21:05 GMT

Weird... It installed the Office XP PIA's, while I don't have that installed on my computer. Shortly after, it started with the Office 2003 PIA's.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to your future postings, since I'm (howevery only remotely) trying to target both Office XP and 2003.

It's good to see the bootstrapper is working, now if only you could update the ClickThrough .wxs file so that we can generate bootstrappers as well ;)

Anyway, WiX is gainging a lot in added functionality lately which is a really cool thing (think Wix 3.0 shaping up, NGen support, WixUI,...)!

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Christopher Painter — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 04:22:31 GMT

Got it... didn't notice the assembly part of it. For the sake of argument, I would `fix` that as you said before some junior setup developer comes by and decides to use that directory table entry for something that doesn't go to the GAC. :)

BTW it's a shame that ccsetup.exe doesn't support silent installs ( Windows Installer Team Rule #34 violation ) or even a simple extraction like the ohotfix patch structure does.

For example I noticed that ccsetup.exe is caching the MSI files, but it's doing it underneath the profile of the user who installed it. That's not going to be very good for resilency.... why not do the LSI location that office uses? This is a Windows Installer Team Rule #31 violation.

BTW users of SMS2003 should be aware of how the SMS Advanced Client can manage the relationship between MSI package source and the distribution points that serves the client. This is a good reason in itself to keep the contents exposed and not trapped inside of an exe.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

robmen — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 04:40:43 GMT

Frederik, it's all under development. I'm currently juggling a number of projects related to WiX plus a full work load at work. There are only so many hours in the day. I'm just glad we were able to squeak this one out successfully.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

robmen — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 04:49:35 GMT

Chris, as I said above, patience. The WiX bootstrapper (the foundation for ccsetup.exe) will eventually support all those things. There was only so much time I had to put towards this project. It's amazing I got the EULA right.

Corporate installs (which drive all the features you bring up) were not the target audience of this release. Go skim the blogs out there. So far, I've seen a lot of positive feedback about the concept and no complaints about the installation experience (although it is hard to tell just how many people have actually tried the install). Individual users who create content (like bloggers) were the focus for this release of the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office. We'll get the corporate install scenarios into the WiX bootstrapper later.

The caching thing is a bug that I'll explain later.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Adam — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 11:28:21 GMT

Interesting. Does using this plugin also change the file format for the document being edited so that the content, which is obviously meant to be editable by as many people as possible, can *actually* be edited without loss of fidelity on systems other than MS Office?

It would seem kind of ironic to save CC-licensed material in a proprietary file format that, in order to get up-to-date documentation for, you need to sign an NDA!

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

robmen — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 19:33:21 GMT

Adam, AFAIK, add-ins cannot change the file format of the document. They just add more data to the document. The user gets to pick what format to save the document as, including HTML if he or she desires.

Supporting the unsupported Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Rob Mensching Openly Uninstalled — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 12:52:18 GMT

Imagine a blog entry where I talk about the issues we've hit in the initial release of the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Joey Barkley — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:12:58 GMT

Rob, I know you said that later on you would be releasing some of this code to the community. Can you tell us if the Office XP PIA install will be redistributable with commercial packages (for instance, when released could a company package it for installation with the VS.NET 2005 Bootstrap as a prereq to a commercial product), or will licensing prohibit commercial redistribution?

Thanks.

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Now that Bill Gates has announced plans to work less at Microsoft after two years, blogs around the world are jumping onto the wagon to announce how Microsoft is going to change and how Microsoft...

re: The WiX toolset presents the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.

Christopher Painter — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 06:45:21 GMT

This isn't really install related but I'm wondering why the decision to write a managed plugin for an unmanaged application was made in the first place.

All the PIA issues would have been eliminated, a bootstrapper wouldn't even have been needed and the install could be a really simple MSI project that could easily support a standard unattended silent installation by GPO/SMS.

No application should EVER be deployed without supporting this scenario. However I am pleased when development shops continue to violate this basic requirement as it keeps me gainfully employed.

Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office: Behind the Office PIAs.

Rob Mensching Openly Uninstalled — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:28:56 GMT

Imagine a blog entry where Bob Arnson steps in and tells the tale of the Office PIAs for the Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office.