I have a moderately complex application that I am trying to write an
installer for. The current installer does not use Windows Installer at
all, but I believe moving to Windows Installer would provide several
benefits for our customer base. Our product requires services to be
started, file shares to be created, and web sites added to the existing
IIS instance. Fortunately, it looks like WiX can handle most of these
requirements, and have learned a great deal about both WiX and the
Windows Installer over the last few weeks. I have a few lingering
questions, though.
Our application has a number of prerequisites that must be present on
the user's machine before our application can be installed.
Additionally, we really don't know all of those prerequisites until
after the user interview via the wizard is complete (e.g., since our
application requires a database, the user may opt to install SQL Server
Express instead of using an existing database server). The correct
sequence of events during an install is as follows:
* Interview the user to determine desired settings
* Install prerequisites
* Install product
Some of the prerequisites are in IExpress self-extracting executables
(like the .NET framework installer), some are standalone MSI files.
Ideally, I would like to offer an integrated install experience, where
the users sees the interview, then one progress dialog box for all of
the subsequent prerequisite and application installs. Furthermore, I'd
really like to let the user install using only the .msi and not have to
use an external bootstrapper executable, but using current versions of
Windows Installer, I know that's a pipe dream. After that long preamble,
here are my questions.
1) Windows Installer has a fairly robust UI mechanism, and it seems
smart to leverage that for the user interview. I'd really rather not
implement the user interview in the chainer in C++ code (yes, I've done
enough research to know I need a chainer), as that seems much harder to
modify for future releases than WiX code. How can I pass the data
collected in the interview to another install process?
2) I've been experimenting with using an external UI to monitor the
install progress, but it seems that the MsiSetExternalUI API only works
for products installed via MsiInstallProduct. How can I handle
displaying progress for those Windows Installer packages embedded as
part of IExpress installs?
3) I've looked at the Windows Installer 4.5 beta, which includes some
facilities for embedding a chainer. Does this help me at all?
Looking at these questions, it looks like most of them are not
specifically WiX questions, but may be more generic Windows Installer
questions. If anyone wants to redirect me to a forum for those
questions, I'd be happy to raise them there.
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