InstallAware

Good morning.

At my company, we are currently looking for a new installer package.

One of the critical things that set my company apart from competitors is that we always develop on the beleeding edge of technology available, and this means that we have already migrated our products to .Net 3.5SP1

However I have noticed that Installaware still does not support this technology, despite it now being out for a couple of weeks.

Somebody has asked about the 3.5 SP1 Runtimes in the support forum, but nobody has bothered to answer him.

What I am asking, is that If I were to choose InstallAware as our deployment system, what sort of service can I expect when new technologies come out? So far, you seem to be lacking in this respect.

Take a look at our press release section - we have a track record of being the first install tool vendor to support new technologies ahead of any other vendor, so your assertion that we lack in this regard is a gross exxageration.

We'll also ship with .NET 3.5 SP1 and SQL 2008 Express support before any other commercial vendor, in the good InstallAware tradition!

Congratulations on shipping these updates.

However, I cannot see in the literature online whether this includes SQL Compact 3.5 SP1.

Is this an omission from the docs, or from the update?

SQL Compact 3.51 was not part of this update.

Do you plan to support this, and if so, what is the timescale?

Given that when Visual studio 2008 SP1 is installed, it forces your projects to use Compact 3.51, this is a fairly big oversight.

I like the Installaware solution, and I really want to say yes, lets go ahead, but as yet it still does not cover the bases properly, unless I do what ppl in your support foum are doing, and scripting the updates themselves.

This is an extremely simple runtime, so I can see it falling below our radar. Compared to the complexities of SQL 2008 and .NET 3.5 with SP1, this runtime is nothing!

You should add the existing runtime to your scripts and customize them for the new Compact version. There is a reason people update the scripts themselves - its very easy!

Of course if you never try, you're missing the whole point of InstallAware! Easy scripting and customization!