Help! MSDE Deployment Issues

[Dana Epp]

Hey guys,

I have a need in which MSDE must be installed for an app to work. As I don't want to distribute the 60megs of files needed, I thought I would just prompt and explain they need to install that first.

The way I was going to do this was to check to see if the regkey HKLM\\SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\MSSQLServer existed, and then error out if it didn't. It would look something like:

~InstallAWARE Clipboard Data~
~End~
~{E05814D6-9130-49E1-B049-0C860638B98B}~
~Terminate Install~
~{7B203E2A-3D4E-4FC8-9A79-E732C20540A9}~
~MessageBox~
~{13F9D730-FB65-499C-9CAA-31844FCBAE0F}~
~$TITLE$ Setup Error~
~This product cannot be installed without MSDE or SQL Server installed. Please ensure you install that first and try again.~
~3~
~1~
~~
~If~
~{D3AFA6A3-5A4E-4BED-9C00-219C5D5E729B}~
~SQLINSTALLED~
~0~
~~
~FALSE~
~Read Registry~
~{5F5D17FF-8302-4584-9FBD-3DBBDA2FFA63}~
~SQLINSTALLED~
~2~
~SOFTWARE\\Microsoft\\MSSQLServer~
~~
~Comment~
~{CD2A67CD-CDEA-4252-8629-AE9F3C696BBF}~
~Check that system has MSDE/SQL installed~

The only problem is, that the "Read Registry" feature, when leaving Value blank tries to read the "Default" value which is not set. So it always fails. I talked to Sinan about this, and he informs me this is by design and that its not possible to check if a key exists or not. *sigh*

Anyone have any better ideas on how to go about this?

While on the topic, has anyone added a remote download support for MSDE in their installer to allow for silent installs? If so, how did you do it? I don't wish to bulk up the install, but also can't determine which files I HAVE to point to to get the install to download and run silently. The MSDE2000A.exe download (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en) is a 40 MB package that does nothing but explode into another 46 files taking up 66 MB on disk... supporting tonnes of languages etc I don't need to support.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

[Dana Epp]

As a reply to this thread, I ended up going around this differently.

I wrote a piece of code called in the installer that scans the system and located any existing MSDE setup.exe files. If it finds it and it matches the version info I need, it uses that for the install.

If it doesn't exist, using a web media block I download the cab and setup msi and then run it directly with the MSI run command. In this way I stay with a small 4 MB installer, and only download the setup as needed.

So far, in every test deployment we have found that if an existing MSDE install is present, they have kept the setup files on the system and we can use that.

YMMV. Good luck.