I've been working with IA 9 R2 for the past few months, after migrating from Installshield, and in general I must say I am very pleased.
I still have not migrated to IA 10, although I am very aware to all its new features and capabilities.
During those months of working with IA I've collected a wish list of mostly missing features, and a few bugs or unexpected behaviors.
The original list contained a few more items, but IA V10 already solved some of them. Good work on that!
I must say before that – most of the missing features can be accomplished in some way, whether by running external commands or some workaround, but the purpose of putting them in that list is to say "guys, please make it easier for us!".
I will start with the main two InstallAware's "Achilles Heels" that always make me feel I am back in my first days of software developing back in the 90's…
1. Source code maintenance, exploring, and writing:
My main installation project script has already reached 1500 lines, and in general it feels very hard to maintain, like the IA source code environment does not support well such (large?) projects. If I compare it to Microsoft Visual Studio, it feels like Visual Studio 6 or even earlier. There are many things IA can learn from Visual Studio in that area.
2. Dialog Designer:
I think this is the main "Achilles Heel" of IA. Although it gives you pretty good BASIC capabilities, it reminds me working with Visual C 4.2 designer. The world has made some progress in that area of forms designers, and it feels like IA developers did not put much effort in that field.
If developing the new hybrid script engine was the main issue of IA 10, building a complete new dialog designer should be, in my opinion, the main goal for IA 11.
Here is a list of some specific missing capabilities and commands:
a. Most of the controls properties are undocumented (for example: try and look, even using Google, for some documentation of "BiDi mode" or what is "htsInterior" in "HotTrackStyle" for the checkbox control..
)b. No timer control. This one I really miss….
c. RTF (the EULA control) cannot contain hyperlinks (that works..)
d. Missing a simple hyperlink control (In MOST cases there is a workaround for that, that gives the user the same experience, but you need to do some work on that, but you cannot accomplis that in non-modal dialog for example)
e. Missing different progress bar visualizations.
f. A small bug - When opening a dialog for edit and some of the controls are set to visible=false (like checkboxes), they are displayed as white box until you save the form/dialog.
g. Missing a simple built-in billboards control (this of course can be accomplished by using the HTML control, but good luck finding the right reply in the forum that gives you the right HTML code that can switch between pictures successfully)
h. Missing a full real HTML control (based on IE engine?)
i. Allow use of pictures of different formats, like PNG, JPG, etc. (and not just BMP). This can help reduce the setup exe file.
3. Allow sign the package (Authenticode) using a simple PFX file (like all other signing tools require). I know there is a process that I can do to create those required files (SPC, PVK), but it is a hard process, with many steps, and I don’t understand why only IA requires those format to run the signing process. Today I use a different external tool to do the signing, and I dropped the use of that feature in IA.
4. Currently there is no way to run some code when user aborts installation during a non-modal dialog display (confirmed with your support guy).
5. Find & replace but only in the selected text and/or from the current line.
6. No pause command line (I know this can be accomplished using some WinAPI command)
7. Copy & Paste of commented command lines should not be pasted uncommented (this one created a few bugs untill I learned topay attention to that...)
8. Allow control ALL project properties from compiler command line and/or compiler variables (including Icon, Product name, product code, etc).
9. Allow include script to call itself (recursion) (This has some workaround of course using labels, etc).
10. Allow control the message displayed to the user when he cancels the installation.
11. Allow control/hide/change text of the IA small progress bar displayed in the very beginning of installation run
12. Allow put label inside if-else-end block (always make my code a bit more complicated to go around this limitation)
13. Allow run process with a pause before (As one of the parameters) (acoriding to some left overs in the IA documentation, this was a feature that was dropped in some version..?)
14. Not so good support for running installation in different DPIs: text sizes are a bit different (a few pixels change).
15. Missing Stop/Delete service command (I know it can be accomplished using the "sc.exe" Windows command)
16. Missing "Replace string in a file" command (I had to write my own implementation for that)
17. Missing "kill process" command (can be accomplished by running "Kill Task" Windows Command).
18. Very hard to find the source of a missing "end" of "Compiler end" command (when compilation failes).
19. Missing a simple "delete file" command (That runs at the same moment). (This can be accomplished by using the "cmd.exe /c del.." Windows command)
20. Message boxed displayed when a non-modal dialog is displayed too might be hidden behind the non-modal dialog and there is no notification for that in the task bar. The installation seems to be stuck.
21. Allow control the build settings of media blocks by compiler variable. This will be much of a help when using build tools (like Microsoft Team System Build Server, Final Builder, etc.).
22. Allow export registry settings to REG file or even TXT file. (In order to copy registry settings from project to project).
23. Missing GetDate/Time command that returns numbers and not text
24. Commands like "create folder" should automatically ignore duplicate "\\".
25. Compiler "if-then-else" commands should behave also like code folding region
26. Missing an option to filter source code by compiler variables, meaning: display just the text that will run/relevant if one or more compiler variables values are x,y,z.
If I will get remember with more items, I will add them here.
Thanks, and continue with that good work.
Oren.
