Hi Dan, This sounds like something similar to what we were trying to do with our installer. The question you should ask yourself is do you need to do this during installation, or could you move some of these steps to a post-install phase?
What we ended up doing is for interactive installations, launching a separate program post-install that does all the key validation and the required webservice calls when the user presses the "Finish" button. For corporate deployments (i.e. silent mode, no UI), certain properties can be embedded in the MSI or provided on the command line - if these are present we call a command line program with CAQuietExec that does pretty much the same thing that the GUI would. The key is further validated by the application at runtime, dropping back into a demo mode if it can't find a license and prompting the user to launch the "activation" GUI program. The end result is a simpler installation that's much easier to manage, requiring an internet connection during install can lead to a number of problems so by separating it out the user doesn't get as confused about why things might be failing. Sascha On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 4:53 AM, Dan Giambalvo <danie...@microsoft.com> wrote: > I'm working on some enhancements to our WiX based setup UI, and wanted to > know if a few things are possible using the UI components Windows Installer > makes available: > > 1) We have a custom action as a part of our installer that makes a web > service call. We'd like to embed in the UI a spinner that would spin during > the time we are making the call. Does such a control exist in the Windows > Installer toolkit? Can we use some type of animated gif for this purpose? > > 2) We have to accept entry of a product-key type code at install. > Ideally, we'd like to add some logic so we auto-add/remove separators at the > right time, don't allow invalid characters (input is Hex) etc. Does Windows > Installer have any mechanism for doing this sort of thing? > > Thanks in advance for any help! > -Dan > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA > is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your > developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay > ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! > http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Come build with us! The BlackBerry(R) Developer Conference in SF, CA is the only developer event you need to attend this year. Jumpstart your developing skills, take BlackBerry mobile applications to market and stay ahead of the curve. Join us from November 9 - 12, 2009. Register now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/devconference _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
