Chapter 5: Windows Installer Inside and Out

Overview

Windows Installer is Microsoft ‚ s solution for a reliable, standardized, and open method of installing software. Tools such as InstallShield Express, which ships with Visual FoxPro, build setup packages for Windows Installer. While it is possible to use a Windows Installer-based setup tool without knowing much, if anything, about Windows Installer itself, your ability to use these setup tools comfortably and effectively improves significantly when you have some understanding of how Windows Installer works. This chapter helps you acquire that understanding.

With the release of Visual FoxPro 7, Microsoft abandoned the familiar VFP setup wizard and replaced it with a special edition of InstallShield Express, thus introducing VFP developers ‚ knowingly or otherwise ‚ to the world of Windows Installer. When you use a Windows Installer-based setup development tool such as InstallShield Express, InstallShield Developer, or Wise for Windows Installer, you ‚ re actually building a special kind of database that contains the instructions and requirements for installing your application. When you install software from a Windows Installer setup package, you invoke the Windows Installer service, telling it to read the installation database and to follow the directions it contains in order to install the software.

Windows Installer is a complex technology. A thorough discussion of it could fill an entire book, and in fact, more than one such book has already been written. The target audience for those books is typically the system administrator and the full-time setup developer ‚ people who need a thorough understanding of the topic and who are probably going to specialize in it or at least spend a significant portion of their time working with it.

The target audience for this book, on the other hand, is application developers like you. If you develop applications in Visual FoxPro, it ‚ s likely you are an application developer first and a setup developer second, and the latter only because you need to know enough about it to distribute applications to your end users. If you ‚ re using a Windows Installer-based setup tool to deploy your applications, you probably want to learn enough about Windows Installer to use that tool comfortably and effectively without having to become a full-time setup developer.

Many of the frustrations application developers encounter when first planning and deploying their applications with Windows Installer-based setup tools relate to issues with Windows Installer itself rather than problems with the particular setup tool being used. A solid understanding of the fundamentals of the Windows Installer technology helps you avoid these frustrations and get the most out of your favorite Windows Installer-based setup tool.