6 replies to this topic

[HänsG]

Hi,

my first post, I hope I'm in the right forum, there are so many to choose from here.

With our product we also deploy the .NET Framework 2.0, the Visual J# redist, the language packs and a licensing prerequisite, which all in all can take quite a while to install, especially when installing on older machines.

The setup should only run on XP or Vista, so we have placed the according condition at product level.

However: Due to the above, the message telling a Windows 2k user that the operating system is not valid appears after the prerequisites have been installed, which can take up to 15 mins. This is very annoying. A lot of our customers will still be running Windows 2k (the last release of our product ran on 2k).

Is there a method to check the Windows version right at the beginning of setup.exe?

Edit: Could I use 'System search' to check a registry key? If so, which one?
EditEdit: This is ridiculous, I just found out that the 'System search wizard' does nothing other than insert a 'LaunchCondition' at product level. So I'm back to square one.

Thanks,

Hans

Edited by HänsG, 20 April 2007 - 10:35.

[Stefan Krueger]

The problem is that all these checks happen in the msi setup, which s launched after the prerequisites are installed.
I think you could use the prerequisite editor to add a condition for the prerequisites to make sure they don't install on older Windows versions, so your setup would go straight to the Launch Condition in your msi in this case.

[HänsG]

Thank you for your reply, Stefan.

Unfortunately I cannot change the conditions on the .prqs because we use them for our older versions of our product as well and I don't really want to have separate .prqs for all of our versions.

Also, the biggest problem is the time it takes to install .NET Framework 2.0, which is included in the release of the main setup.

Would it be possible to somehow put a condition on the .NET Framework install itself? I haven't found anything suitable yet.

Thanks,

Hans.

[Stefan Krueger]

No, I don't think that's possible (unless you create a custom prerequisite for it)

[Glytzhkof]

Could you auto run a checkprerequisites.exe file if you deliver this on a CD? If not, could you make a simple cd-browser style launcher which will do all checks automatically before extracting the installer?

[HänsG]

That might be a possibility, of course, thanks. I would have liked a more elegant solution, though, and for the moment, as usual, there are more important issues to see to ...

I'll have to look into this later on.

Hans

[Glytzhkof]

From a corporate deployment perspective it is always better to have all prerequisites outside the MSI being used. This allows easy and elegant large scale deployment. If you include a file called Corporate Deployment Readme.txt or similar and state the pre-reqs and any installation order, your product will be very well received indeed by corporations. If you couple this with a CD style browser for the small office and home user you are delivering a far better deployment experience than the vast majority of other software companies.

Remember: the installation is the first impression for your product! There are few things that are more important for overall product marketing success than a successful install :-).