The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer

Installing new software is perhaps the most adrenalin-inducing experience you’ll have on a computer, aside from whatever games you might play. It’s not hard to see why. You give over control of the system to a program that often demands Administrator privilege and that then starts updating some of the most fragile parts of your system. You might know the actual product being installed quite well, but there’s rarely any documentation about what the installation of it will do to your system. It might install kernel drivers or Services, it might alter your personal settings without your permission, and it might result in other applications on your system no longer working. For a company building and shipping software, the installation might be the first time the customer has seen your product or your company, and it’s your opportunity to make a lasting impression one way or the other. An unreliable installation will affect the customer’s image of you for a long time.

The goal of this book is to show you how to build safe and secure installations. Its focus is Windows Installer technology on the Windows NT series of operating systems for Windows 2000 and above, and you’ll build example projects as Visual Studio Setup and Deployment Projects. Aside from the actual nuts and bolts of building Windows Installer-based installations, I’ll offer advice on how to build a reliable installation and what you should and shouldn’t do. The integration of installer technology as part of the Windows operating system means that the dividing line between an application and its installation has become much less sharp, and the book will cover how you need to design applications to integrate properly with Windows Installer.

The book starts with basic principles and drills down deeper in later chapters. I start with the installation equivalent of the “Hello World” program, and then gradually get deeper into the contents of installer MSI files, including installation in the .NET Framework world. Along the way I’ll stop to look at best practices and how to keep your installation reliable. Where I show use of the installer APIs, I’ll use VBScript for the sake of simplicity and clarity, but I’ll also point you at the Win32 equivalents and show you a couple of ways to call them from the .NET Framework language C#.

As is often the case when you try to explain something, you find that you test your understanding, and if you’re lucky you learn something new at the same time. I hope you learn as much from reading this book as I did writing it.