Mike Dimmick wrote:
> Or if you're using advertised shortcuts, which you need to if you want
> install-on-demand or advertised products to work. Advertised shortcuts will
> cause Windows Installer to be invoked to install/repair the feature that the
> shortcut links to.

Not all features have shortcuts.. in fact most don't, generally.  You 
want to keep the number of shortcuts to a minimum (IIRC the MS 
recommendations are one for your main app plus a submenu for documentation).

Pretty much unless you specifically code your app to handle it then it 
isn't going to work - and few apps are (in fact the only app I've seen 
that actually does that is MS Office.. and that sometimes gets it 
spectacularly wrong).

> Most developers don't live in a centrally-managed environment where users
> hot-desk and could be assigned different applications from those permitted
> to different users sharing the same computer, but that's one of the problems
> that Windows Installer was designed to solve. That's my view on where
> per-user versus per-machine comes from.

In centrally managed environments runnning the installer as a user is 
*not* an option.  Some (probably most) of the admins I've worked with 
would have a major fit if an app brought up MSI as an ordinary user, 
even by an advertised shortcut.  In most large companies the correct 
procedure is to put a request in to IT and wait two weeks for approval. 
  Sucks, but that's the way it is and I don't see that changing.

> Some of the ICE rules seem to be around cleaning up a per-user installation
> after the application has been un-assigned from a user.
> 
That may be what they were designed for but it's not what is happening - 
  the ICE for example is saying that for a per-machine installation you 
must put a registry entry in HKCU.  The person doing the per-machine 
installation is likely to be an administrator, not the user doing the 
install, so the registry entry makes no sense.

It makes even less sense when you factor in that a *different* 
administrator may do the uninstall.  Even though it's a global install 
the MSI system won't be able to tell what components are installed and 
will fail to uninstall those that use the HKCU key, leading to the 
opposite problem - incomplete install.

As there is no such thing as a per-user add/remove programs (even in 
Vista.. maybe Longhorn will add one) there's no way for individual users 
to rectify this and just remove their parts - they've either got to 
remove the entries by hand or get an admin to do it.

Tony



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