Windows installer wikipdia

Administrative installations are also useful when creating a Windows Installer patch, which requires uncompressed images of the earlier and current versions of a product in order to compute binary file differences.

The developer of an installer package may write code to serve their own purpose, delivered in a DLL. This can be executed during the installation sequences, including when the user clicks a button in the user interface, or during the InstallExecuteSequence.

Custom Actions typically validate product license keys, or initialise more complex services. Developers should normally provide inverse custom actions for use during uninstallation. A Windows Installer package may contain another package to be installed at the same time. These are ideally provided as a.

The file can then optionally be deleted before the end of the InstallExecuteSequence, and so is ideal for using with older installers. Windows Installer allows applications to run directly from a network share , without the need for a local copy run from source ; it can repair broken installations by restoring damaged or deleted files, registry entries and application shortcuts; it supports per-user installation of applications; it can resolve component identifiers into paths, allowing applications to avoid hard-coded file paths; and it natively supports patches.

Version 2. It is also unique among installation software frameworks for Windows in that it is highly transparent. The full API and all command-line options are documented; packages are freely viewable and editable, both with free tools and programmatically as opposed to the proprietary and even weakly encrypted packages of InstallShield ; and the format for file archives is the well documented cabinet file format.

Windows Installer 4. MSI packages can be marked as not requiring elevated privileges to install, thus allowing a package to install without prompting the user for Administrator credentials. Windows Installer also works in conjunction with the Restart Manager; when installing or updating an application or system component with "full" user interface mode, the user will be displayed a list of affected applications that can be shut down, and then restarted after files have been updated. Installer actions running in silent mode perform these application restarts automatically.

System services and tray applications can also be restarted in this manner. Windows Installer supports detailed logging as a powerful diagnostic tool.

The resulting log is named MSI. Although verbose logs are very useful for diagnosing Windows Installer problems, they can be very long and difficult to read without practice. A quick way to find the location of a problem in the log is to open it in a text editor such as Notepad and search for the phrase "Return Value 3".

This entry commonly appears in logs close to the point where a critical error has occurred. To output debug information in the log file, pass "x" on the command line or add it to the Logging registry value. For example, the following command installs Package. Creating an installer package for a new application is non-trivial. It is necessary to specify which files must be installed, to where, with what registry keys.

There are a number of commercial and freeware products to assist in creating installers; for example Installshield , Wise Installer and WiX. To varying degrees, the user interface and behaviour in less common situations such as unattended installation, may be configured. Once prepared, an installer package is "compiled" by reading the instructions and files from the developer's local machine, and creating the.

The user interface dialog boxes presented at the start of installation can be changed or configured by the setup engineer developing a new installer. There is a limited language of buttons, textfields and labels which can be arranged in a sequence of dialogue boxes.

An installer package should be capable of running without any UI, for what is called "unattended installation". ICE validation can be performed with the Platform SDK tools Orca and msival2, or with validation tools that ship with the various authoring environments. Though hard drive capacities have increased substantially some might consider the following as wasted space.

During installation, a copy of the. MSI package may be copied to the user's temporary directory prior to installation, even if the same package is stored locally. Necessary Necessary. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.

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