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DIYS setup.exe


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donjacour

donjacour
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Posted 02 March 2005 - 04:37

Hi,

I've been writing basic MSI installers using InstallShield DevStudio 9. One area I don't really understand is how to control the setup.exe behavior as it runs. Here is a list of questions that I don't know the answer to.

How does the setup.exe (from InstallShield) contain the .msi file it eventually uses to do the install?

How does the setup.exe from InstallShield differ from the setup.exe which is part of the Microsoft SDK?

Can I use the setup.exe project that comes with the Microsoft Windows Installer SDK so that it includes the .msi file? Is this what the msistuff.exe program does? I want one .exe file that contains everything.

Does anyone have any pointers about the right way to build setup.exe. I eventually got it to compile by creating a new project with msdev 6.0 after replacing lstrcpy and lstrcat with StringCbCopy and StringCbCat? Has anyone else been down this path?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

-Bob

Stefan Krueger

Stefan Krueger

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Posted 02 March 2005 - 16:40

1. This depends on your selections in the release wizard. If you selected a web setup type, then everything will be packaged into a self extracting exe. This is a WinZIP compatible self-extractor.

2. InstallShield's setup.exe supports multiple language installs (display language selection dialog and apply language transforms), run your install as a minor update with the correct command line parameters is required, pre-install prerequisistes (if set to do so, such as MSDE, IE, etc.), pre-install the MSI runtime and the .NET Framework if required, download these prerequisites and even the .smi and CAB file from the web, just to name a few.

donjacour

donjacour
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Posted 03 March 2005 - 23:37

Thanks Stephan,

You provide a few more tidbits of info. InstallShield's setup.exe is winzip compatible and does the things you say.

I want to be able to add functionality to the setup.exe program. For example call a dll function. Is there a way to do that with DevStudio 9.0's setup.exe? How about 10.5?

It seems like the Windows Installer SDK's setup.exe will allow lots of flexibility around this, but I have not been successful in getting it to build, configure and run the way I want.

-Bob

Stefan Krueger

Stefan Krueger

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Posted 04 March 2005 - 14:46

The source code of InstallShield's setup.exe is not publicly available so you cannot modify it. In general you cannot call a DLL from the setup.exe. Why don't you call the DLL from your actual setup (msi) as a custom action? If oyu need to do it before the msi starts you may be able to build your own exe for that purpose and run it as a prerequisite, or as a pre-launcher.