Sascha, Thanks for the reply. Long term (& philosophically), I generally agree with you. I think the idea of doing as little as possible in the installer, and pushing it instead to a branded first-run experience inside the application has a lot of benefits. People don't like dealing with installers, and in general you have a lot more flexibility in what you can do from within the codebase of the product. The downside of course is that windows installer then doesn't know about the things you've done, and so can't undo them to restore/maintain machine state. You could argue the same is true for custom actions anyway, and are probably right. But I digress.
In the short term, we do have need to do this in the installer. Our install process currently involves some rather time-intensive tasks which we don't want the user to have to wait on IF they are only going to have to give up and go home because they don't have a key. Undoubtedly all of this could be moved into some post-install step, but that is out of scope for where we are in our product cycle. We're going to have to make do with what Windows Installer gives us. Longer term, I'm hoping to move in the direction you've prescribed. We also have a rather unique set of requirements and a pretty controlled install environment, which also helps mitigate some of the (very good) points you raise W.R.T. install-time checks like we're doing. Thanks again for your feedback -Dan -----Original Message----- From: Sascha Beaumont [mailto:sascha.beaum...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 7:16 PM To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Questions on more advanced WiX Installer UI 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 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
