64-bit Managed Custom Actions with Visual Studio
A reader who happened across my post on Windows Installer on 64-bit Platforms mentioned a problem with running 64-bit managed custom actions using the Visual Studio 2005 Windows Installer project. This...
View ArticleDifferentiating 64-bit Editions of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003
Microsoft Windows provides a lot of base services on which applications can be written, but there are differences between all the various editions of Windows. While it’s far more common to have a...
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Common Controls in Windows Installer UI
Notice the differences between the following two dialogs from the same Windows Installer package on the same Windows XP machine. The first dialog is displayed when launching a sample .msi file using...
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Blog Customizations, Part 4: OpenSearch Discovery
I’m a big fan of extensibility, which is why I was excited to see in a recent blog post on the IE Blog about OpenSearch discovery using <link/> elements. OpenSearch is a collection of XML schemas...
View ArticleExtract Files from Patches
From the mailbag, someone asked how to extract files from a patch. Now presumably one would want to extract the files as they apply to a product if the patch were installed but I will cover both ways...
View ArticleFast Searching in Public Folders
I respond to a lot of questions answered on an internal alias for Windows Installer support, some of which inspire posts on my blog. That alias is also archived in a public folder on our corporate...
View ArticleDetermine Which Files are Being Patched
Installing a patch will often mean that files are to be updated, though patching isn’t limited or even required to just patch files. Starting with Windows Installer 3.0 you can find the final sequence...
View ArticleBook Review: Customizing the Microsoft .NET Framework Common Language Runtime
As you might have noticed from various posts on my blog I love understanding how things work. When I started learning the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.0 I delved into intermediate language (IL) for most...
View ArticleIdentifying Windows Installer File Types
I’ve been writing a number of helpful tools at work such as a tool to extract transforms and cabinets from a patch and wasn’t satisfied relying on the file extension to identify a patch, or other...
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