As the person who started this thread, I never had any intention of dragging up the "installer classes are evil thread". Sorry about that. My only real intent was to suggest the creation of WiX alternatives to the obvious stuff.
However, I am curious about this now. For the people who use installer classes, how many people use them with the "built-in" Installer-derived classes (event log, perf counter, WMI, service install), and how many use them for implementing custom CAs for doing tricky product-specific stuff? Like I said before, I'm not morally opposed to managed code CAs and I see them as potentially must more robust and powerful than the script CAs that already exist. There is also nothing that prevents them from being declarative and table-driven and all that other goodness that defines a well-designed CA. However, I wonder if the Installer class is the blueprint I'd use for a good design, or if I'd keep the attribute model for locating the classes but use something more more simple (or an interface driven design, so I don't have to use someone else's base class)? The composite pattern that Installer implements is kind of interesting, but I'm not sure that a feature that allows creating nested trees of installers is also a good thing or not from the MSI perspective. What would make a good managed CA? Joe Kaplan ----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Arnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "John Vottero" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, July 23, 2006 9:15 PM Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Should WiX add support for installingWindowsinstrumentation features? > John Vottero wrote: >> Reposting this message at regular intervals (either manually or >> automatically) does no good whatsoever. > That doesn't change the fact that it's a well-written message. > >> If there are problems with the >> Installer based classes they should be reported to Microsoft so that the >> problems can be fixed. >> > Easy fix: Make Installer sealed.<g> > > Running arbitrary code during installation is bad. It's self-reg, except > worse. The entire design of MSI is based on the idea of describing your > setup and letting MSI interpret the description. Running code is bad and > should be avoided whenever possible. >> If you read the documentation for the Installer classes, it never >> implies that they are merely developer hacks that shouldn't be used in a >> production environment. In fact, Visual Studio provides the >> InstallUtilLib custom action to call Installer classes from an MSI. >> > True. And it's an excellent example of why many folks suggest avoiding > .vdproj. >> Don't all custom actions have the potential to break reference counting? >> Why use the reference counting argument against one custom action but >> not others? >> > Yes they do -- and QuietExec is often abused. But there's a difference > between running arbitrary code in a CA and running a well-designed CA > whose operations are described via data in tables in the package. > > Quite simply, it's hard to do good CAs. Even if you were to argue that > there's too much coding overhead to do declarative setup, it's hard to > argue against uninstall and rollback CAs. Yet often it's exactly that > kind of resilience that people skip when writing one-off CAs. We see it > all the time, even inside Microsoft. (That's why "but VS does it" isn't > much of an excuse.) >> Installer classes have way too much momentum and too many supporters >> within Microsoft to be ignored, it's time for WiX and Windows Installer >> to figure out how to support them. >> > Or lobby the supporters to come to their senses. > > -- > sig://boB > http://bobs.org > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT > Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share > your > opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash > http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
