Also agree 100% on this for the reasons Chris mentions. The rest of this message is my (perhaps strong) opinion on web setups. Web setups for development tools in general encourage bad habits. It might not be such a big deal with "consumer" software on home computers, like Acrobat Reader & company - which fits in with the general consumer business of "buy this mobile device [cell phone, tablet, MP3 player, laptop], don't worry about maintenance - you'll throw it in the trash bin in a year anyway". These vendors don't think about long-term maintenance - a web setup is one aspect of this. But WiX is not consumer software, and a web setup has no place with WiX users who are correctly managing their development environment & processes - for the reasons Chris mentions. (Unless you are developing throw-away software that won't last a year). I need to be able to check out code from my repository 5 years down the road, and recompile it with exactly the same tools used to originally build that software from 5 years ago. Web setups don't provide a guarantee that I can reproduce the same development environment.
The best way of distributing long-lifetime software is a complete image provided by the vendor that has not been contaminated with customer-specific license information. For smaller packages (like WiX), that is often a single setup executable. For larger packages (e.g. Office or Visual Studio), it MUST take the form of an ISO file. Send me my product key separately, thank you. I recently bought a copy of Office 2010 Pro online. The setup was provided in a self-extracting EXE with the product key already embedded in it. I specifically sought out the option to order a "backup DVD" - especially because I wanted a perfect, unmodified image of MS Office that wasn't contaminated with customer-specific information, and didn't require a self-extractor. Why can't they just provide the ISO for download after I buy the software? Beats me. Heck, why don't they just put the Office ISO available for public download on the web site? With Office Product Activation, there's really no reason why not - the ISO would install a trial version until you activate it... I really don't want to see Visual Studio go down the path Office has taken with distribution. I was happy with the way WiX 3.0 was distributed: full MSI file, full binary archive, and source code archive. Please keep those options, it was perfect. :) No need to mess with funny distribution methods like MS Office, Adobe, etc. do. More ranting: web setups have been one of my biggest annoyances in setup for the past several years. Call me old-fashioned, but when the vendor then makes it difficult to find a direct link to an "offline" installer to bypass the web install junk, I then start getting irate. Requiring me to run with some "/layout" option instead of providing a complete, offline image definitely falls under the category of getting me irate. (What if I don't run it perfectly and get a perfect, definitive image of everything needed for an offline distribution?) A downloader that installs itself onto my computer (separate from the software being installed, and requiring me to later remove it using Add/Remove Programs) is another highly offensive behavior. Making me install ActiveX controls is another way. So at the end of the day, there would have better be an offline installer ready for one-click download. Oftentimes, the built-in downloader in my web browser provides a better, consistent experience (e.g. pause/resume, and better handling if the connection drops) - and it doesn't leave behind additional unwanted cruft on my computer. I realize Burn might not offend in all these different ways - but with every software vendor doing their own thing, it is better for me to not waste my time, and just get the offline installer. -----Original Message----- From: Christopher Painter [mailto:chr...@iswix.com] Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 15:49 To: Rob Mensching; General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Wow! Rob, Regarding /layout, all developers *SHOULD* be doing it despite losing those "savings". (Assuming any savings is actually realized based on how many developers are installing the software. ) Anyone involved in the process of developing software ( especially build and release engineering ) should have mature policies regarding the ability to track and archive changes to the development environment. If I have to rebuild a build machine or developer machine I have to be able go back and reinstall all of the tools exactly the way they were originally intended. Relying on content for a web-enabled installer to be available 1,5,10 years down the road ( we still get requests to rebuild VB6 applications! ) is a horrible practice as the external dependency is outside of your control. You must keep your own archive of the tool to ensure the SLA can b met. Everyone who understands CM should be doing this. Thus /layout is not only an annoyance to me, it's an antipattern. Chris ---------------------------------------- From: "Rob Mensching" <r...@robmensching.com> Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 9:38 AM To: chr...@iswix.com, "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset." <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Wow! 1. The WiX install *does* chain NETFX 4 in because that is needed before the WiX BA can show UI (since the WiX BA is written in WPF). 2. Dogfooding is the primary reason. 3. We save *significant* bandwidth using Burn because during normal installs it only downloads the portions of the product that you actually need. If *everyone* start using /layout those savings will be lost. <smile/> 4. The wixstdba UI is not as functional as we'd like but the web install experience is significantly better. Click download like, survive the web browser screening process (this gets better if we can get WiX signed), click "Run" and in a second the ~500kb exe is verified and running. Then you have a nice experience while the process downloads and installs only the parts you need. Admittedly, if you want a full layout, then you do "Save" and have to run another command-line. That scenario is not optimized. 5. ISOs are inferior to /layout because they do not get the built-in robust downloading of Burn. You could use a 3rd party downloader but that 3rd party download cannot verify the downloaded ISO file the way Burn will verify and retry each file. We are moving the cheese a little bit here to challenge the status quo and see if we can't make things better for advanced users and less-advanced users at the same time. My takeaway is that we may have deprioritized the /layout scenario too much and should evaluate that going into the home stretch. On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Christopher Painter <chr...@iswix.com> wrote: Other then being allowing WiX to dogfood Burn, what benefit does the WiX installer even gain from using Burn? I thought the old Mondo UI looked just fine and it was a simpler 1 MSI story to boot. My experience with the Burn based WiX installers is that user experience is inferior relative to what it was. It doesn't seem like to me that WiX.msi needed any of the capabilities of Burn as it doesn't do things like install the .NET framework for you or chain multiple packages together. Personally, I still want my Visual Studio in ISO format and when SP1 comes out I'd appreciate a service release that contains it. I get sick of spending 20 minutes to install Visual Studio and 60 minutes to patch it. ---------------------------------------- From: "Bruce Cran" <br...@cran.org.uk> Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 8:43 AM To: "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset." <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Wow! On 05/03/2012 14:01, keith.doug...@statcan.gc.ca wrote: > The below news is somewhat distressing for those of us who have no Internet connection at all on our development workstations and have to use others (non-development machines) to get such access. Is downloading the /layout way and then (say) moving a directory or something going to work, or does /layout change other things (registry)? If it is going to work, will the procedure be well documented? If not, what do you propose people in my sort of situation to do? > > (And if Visual Studio 2011 works either of those ways we're going to > be in a world of hurt here ...) As I understand it, /layout does nothing more than grab a copy of the files for offline use - for example the WDK 8 beta comes as a .zip that looks like it's been created by running /layout since there's wdksetup.exe and an 'Installers' directory. If you rename the directory, wdksetup.exe goes online to fetch the files. Of course it doesn't help if you want to do the download using your Mac. -- Bruce Cran ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users -- virtually, Rob Mensching - http://RobMensching.com LLC ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Try before you buy = See our experts in action! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-dev2 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
