I'm in one of this situations where the product is in Beta, stable but not yet actually released. Therefore the codebase is locked down such that only the most pressing code changes are allowed to get checked in. In the ideal situation we'd have...

Vacation was longer than I expected, but now it's over and it's back to work!

School's out and it's officially summer! I'm on vacation for 2 weeks. I'll be back and posting more MSI, InstallShield and Configuration Management related items in mid-June. Enjoy your summer! Susan

My last post Common Tasks: Validating a Path received this comment from HookEm: Two of your 5 conditions can be handled without a custom action using the native MSI controls: "Must be less than 200 characters in length": see the Text property...

The built-in dialog for selecting the Destination Folder will automatically do a certain amount of validation on the selected path. For example, if the user types in a path using a character that isn't allowed by Windows (such as a question mark ...

Out-of-the-box (meaning the default Basic MSI project) your Basic MSI installer project is already capable of handling most of the standard installation actions. But what are some of the common features that you might want to add to the installer project...

The scenario here is that the previous install developer won the lottery and ran off to Bimini with his girlfriend, leaving YOU the job of taking over a dozen different InstallShield 12 install projects. Let's assume you know very little about installer...

In the last post on this topic we defined an attribute for a <script> task. Note: You can find the file, as we last left it, attached to the previous post if you want to go grab a copy of it for reference. The finished file for this post is attached...

I used to think that opening nAnt files in Visual Studio was a lot of wasted overhead and not worth it. But I've realized that the auto-completion and IntelliSense features make it very worthwhile... so... here is how you setup Visual Studio 2005...

Note: The finished file is attached to this post. Scroll down to the bottom of the post for the link. In my previous post I wrote a simple C# <script> task that could open an InstallShield ISM from an nAnt script. The eventual goal is to call the...

So in my previous post I got a simple C# app written that modifies the ISM. Alright, now to put this into the nAnt script. I'm going to assume a basic familiarity with nAnt here... Note: I'm using nAnt .085 build. Of course, start with a <target>...

As part of my nAnt build process, I discovered I needed to modify a setting in my installer at build time. InstallShield's Standalone Automation Interface provides a pretty simple way to interact with the install project using COM. Note: I use the...

Most installations should be per-machine installations at this point. So with a per-machine installation say that you have a need to run something on the next reboot. Typically you'd put it in the HKLM RunOnce key. On Windows XP and Vista, limited...

Continuing with the walkthrough of making a DLL from my previous blog ... As a reminder, I'm following along with Chapter 19 (Dynamic Link Libraries) from Programming Windows 95 by Charles Petzold. I have a header file with a macro defined for exporting...

(Note: I’m using InstallShield 12 for my install development and Visual Studio 2005 for DLL development.) The goal is to learn to make a simple DLL that I can use in an MSI custom action. Today I started with the basics using a classic book that still...