InstallAware

If you try to open an InstallAware project in the InstallAware IDE and that project uses plug-ins that are not installed on your computer, InstallAware tells you about the problem and does not load the project. This is good.

However, if you run miabuild.exe from the command-line to build the InstallAware project and plug-ins are not installed on your computer, the build completes successfully, without error or warning. This is bad! What you get is a broken installer that may appear to work correctly in some instances but not in others.

In my case, I am using the AxoNet Upgrade Code plug-in (great plug-in, BTW) to allow for upgrades from my old-style, pre-InstallAware installers to work. These upgrades were working fine for me with installers I built, but several developers at our site could not upgrade from an old-style installation to an InstallAware installer that they built. Our solution has a project that builds the InstallAware project by calling miabuild.exe. Since there was no error from miabuild - no error code, no failure, not even a warning in the build log - it appeared that the resulting setup.exe was good. But it wasn't.

miabuild.exe should fail if the InstallAware project it is building requires plug-ins that are not installed.

I agree on this, this has caused some problems for me aswell. I hope this will be changed in future updates.

This has been a long time request and will be handled by R&D in upcoming updates.