Look, No Hands: InstallShield’s Automation Tools

The InstallShield environment’s assistants, Installation Designer, and wizards make up a graphical front end for authoring your installation project, where you define your product name and version, your feature–component–data hierarchy, and release information. These graphical tools enable you to quickly prototype, organize, build, validate, and test your installation. When the shape of your installation project is complete, you’ll usually want t…

November 23, 2010 Revenera

Setting Permissions in Windows Installer: MSILockPermissionsEX and ISLockPermissions

One of the fundamental problems with Windows Installer (MSI) versions before 5.0 was an inability to change permissions reliably on an object in an installer (such as a registry key, file, or folder). When the MSI installs that object, the default behaviour is that the object will inherit the permissions from its parent folder or key. If we set permissions on an object in the UI in InstallShield 2009 and earlier, an entry was added to the LockPer…

November 16, 2010 Revenera

Using MSI Launch Conditions to Prevent Installation on Unsupported Windows Platforms

Before Windows 7, support for 64-bit Windows was not really a concern for most applications because they were aimed squarely at the 32-bit Windows market.  With Windows 7, a large percentage of Windows users will be using the 64-bit version, which means that your setup program has to know what to do when it encounters 64-bit Windows.  If your software only works on certain versions of Windows, you should be using launch conditions to prevent user…

November 10, 2010 Alan Burns

Choosing Your Project Type: Basic MSI, InstallScript, or InstallScript MSI

Much of an installation developer’s time is spent maintaining an existing installation project. Once in a while, however—often because of a new product version or product line, or a desire to migrate to a more professional-level installer—you’ll need to create a new installation project. If you’re fortunate enough to be creating your product’s first installer, the natural first question to ask is, Which project type should I use? InstallShield pr…

November 4, 2010 Revenera

Tips for Building Mac OS X Installers with InstallAnywhere

By Fletcher Oliver I’m a Mac user, and I wanted to share with my fellow developers a few tips I’ve learned for building Mac OS X installers with InstallAnywhere. First, you should always determine exact requirements for the resulting installer. Do you need a simple installer for a non-experienced end user to install a complex product, or a highly customizable installer for higher-level users? Prioritizing and defining what features to…

November 2, 2010 Revenera