Windows Installer and Application Suites
Kallely Sajan
that I create an application suite out of a set of of stand-alone msi based
application installations. The answer I got was a probable YES. I knew that
it is not a trivial task to do. I promised that I would get back to the
newsroom with some update. So here is the update (, for those who care).
Unfortunately, Windows Installer does not seem to support this functionality
natively. I think Microsoft should have put more thought to this sort of a
suite installation development requirement. May be the Windows Installer is
born out of the brains of MS Office development team. No doubt MS Office is
a complicated installation. But that does not match the scale of a real
complicated product suite. Windows Installer should natively support suite
building.
Nested installation is not the answer to this. As most of you know, a nested
install will screw up the whole uninstallation. May be it is good for a
mickey mouse sub-install. The limitation that no two msi installations can
be in the execute sequence at the same time is a killer. May be there is a
reason. But, according to me, it is an architecture/design flow. Those who
do the real development know that one has to internally launch 3rd party
installations at times. This might not be big deal today as many vendors are
still using non-MSI installs to package their products. As more and more
ISVs start using Windows Installer, we will land in big trouble. This might
be least bothering to Microsoft.
Let me try to explain some of the issues I am trying to solve. It is not
simple as one might think. Consider a suite of ten products. How does a user
install all of them? Go through each of the UI, answer questions, click
Next... Next...??? When these ten products are developed at ten locations,
how do I do a distributed develoment? These products can also be
stand-alone - with its own sets of features. So, creating merge modules for
each one of them and making a big MSI file is not the answer. The suite
cannot have pre-knowledge of each product's content. Each installation might
have its own set of custom dialog boxes and questions to answer. How can I
extract those custom dialogs out of the individual MSIs, show all dialogs at
once, and also be able to display a complete feature selection tree for the
whole suite of products. Assume that the products use lots of Microsoft and
3rd party common files as merge modules. How do I make sure that I don't
duplicate the same set of files inside each install kit? Last but not least,
how can make sure that I get the file costing right to an extent. You get
the idea, right?
Now, the good news is that we have sort of solved the problem. I believe I
have a nice system that is built over the Windows Installer, addressing the
issues I identified above. I am in beta stage now. My development teams have
already started using it. I can generate a suite installer msi dynamically
out of the stand-alone product MSIs. The only limitation that I have now is
that I can't run the suite msi itself unattended. But I have addressed that
also in a different way.
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Regards,
Sajan.