InstallAware

In the application runtimes node there is a list of selectable runtimes that can be pre-installed if they are not present on the target machine. If I create a .Net project type one of the selected runtimes is Microsoft Windows Installer 3.0. Under what conditions would I want to change that and select a different version, say 3.1 or 4.5? If IA is responsible for generating the package should it not decide what's best?

Is there anything I can do or use in the MSI code for example, where I would want to change the 3.0 pre-installation to 4.5? Could it be that 4.5 introduced new features such as chaining and rollbacks (to name one) that IA 8 does not yet support, hence the decision to select 3.0?

I have the option to change it but I'm not sure why I'd want to or need to. So far, I've left it set to 3.0 but out of curiosity I'd like to know all the same.

When you select a runtime, InstallAware automatically selects the necessary runtimes for that runtime along with it. You may of course remove these manually if you like for whatever reason, including the possibility of installing a newer runtime.

I don't understand why you think InstallAware lacks MSI 4.5 support. We were the first to support it in coupled beta with Microsoft, far ahead of InstallShield. We do support chaining and transactions and even have a blog post about it.

One nice thing you can do with InstallAware and MSI 4.5 is to test your setup in active installation mode but with the ability to roll everything back in a single click if you don't like the result of the installed system! Use the MSI Transaction plug-in and read the blog post to find out more.

MichaelNesmith wrote:...I don't understand why you think InstallAware lacks MSI 4.5 support. We were the first to support it in coupled beta with Microsoft, far ahead of InstallShield. We do support chaining and transactions and even have a blog post about it...

Michael, I meant no offence or other mischief and I recall reading somewhere that IA was the first to embrace 4.5. That being the case, would it not then be valid to have 4.5 selected as the default and not 3.0? As 4.5 is the latest and greatest offering I suppose there is a reason why 3.0 is selected as the default and maybe that's a safe bet for most machines. I've deselected all the checkboxes in some sample projects I've converted as I know I don't need to rely on any pre-installations.

No offence taken, I apologize if it seemed that way.

Runtimes always select the minimum version required - this way an unnecessary system update on the target machine is avoided. For instance even though MSI 4.5 will be fine for a runtime that only needs MSI 3.x, that might mean an ultimately unnecessary download and installation and possibly problems (perhaps due to version conflicts on MSI and maybe not even on your app/install but others) on a customer whose machine already has the MSI 3.x runtime.

Of course if you intend to leverage MSI 4.5 features anyways then you can go ahead and do this right away. But our philosophy is to always reduce possible points of failure across the board so we take a conservative approach with all system updates.

Thanks Michael. That makes perfect sense now.