Windows Installer was created in the days of physical software distribution and small hard disks. Physical software distribution means you can and should put all prerequisites in the disc. It doesn't matter if you ship a dozen different products and all of them "waste" 100MB with the exact same shared DLLs. Small hard disks means that if you install those dozen applications, you wouldn't want all of them installing their own 100MB copy of the DLLs, you would want them installed once and shared across the products.
The way shared components work in Windows Installer fits this perfectly. Each MSI carries its own copy of the shared components, but that doesn't matter because they are on different discs. When you install the products, the shared components are only installed once on the user's hard disk. We're now in the age of digital distribution, where requirements change. I think trying to avoid duplicated hard disk usage is still important, but it's even more important to reduce bandwidth use. If I have a dozen applications which share components, and the user wants to install even two of the apps, ideally he should only download the shared components *once*. The only way I know to do this in Windows Installer is not to use multiple products sharing components, but instead to put the shared stuff in its own MSI. Then each application installer will have a bootstrapper that checks if the shared-stuff product is already installed, and if it's not, it downloads the shared msi and installs it. Yhen the next application won't need to. Is there a different way to do this? For example, is it possible to have one msi per application with shared components, but put the shared files in a different non-embedded cabinet, and have the bootstrapper only download this cabinet if needed? -- Nicolás ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ October Webinars: Code for Performance Free Intel webinars can help you accelerate application performance. Explore tips for MPI, OpenMP, advanced profiling, and more. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register > http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60134791&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
