3 replies to this topic

[dathay]

I have a general question that I'm trying to deal with.

I'm in a situation where we have numerous "products" that are being developed in house plus we have some third party "products" that we are including in our installs. On top of this we also have OEM partners who want to pick and chose which products their customers will and will not see.

We have argued back and forth here at work about the best way to approach this. One suggestion is to write a shell application that would dynamically pick up the MSIs that were on a CD and based on an configuration file, present the user with a UI that looks like the standard MSI Feature tree. The other option is to write one huge MSI that incorporates all the products. 3rd party products would have to be included as merge modules.

One of the debates here is that the "shell application" method would allow the different products to be developed as stand alone MSIs with their own CA etc... whereas one big MSI would mean that everyone would have to produce MSMs which we would then deal with.

As far as I can see both options have both their good points and their bad so the big question is what do you guys think and has anyone else had to deal with this type of problem


David Athay
Software and Installer Developer

[Stefan Krueger]

One point to consider is updates. If you need to install updates to those packages indepently, go for separate MSIs. If everything is one big MSI (including merge modules) then a patch for this MSI is needed whenever some application is updated. Microsoft learned this the hard way for the MSDE merge modules when the Slammer worm hit the internet and many software vendors were slow to provide updates with a security fix.

[dathay]

Stefan,

Thanks for the input. I had been thinking about updates in general but the case you mention of the MSDE is very compelling.

The other suggestion I have recieved recently is using DemoShield to put together a unified installation point. Problem is that we also need a unified uninstall point too.

Oh well. We will figure something out.

--David
PS. Stefan are you in the Netherlands? If so go eat some drop for me please! My wife has banned me from eating Zoute Drop and Double Zoute as my blood presure isn't the greatest and she is affraid they will kill me.

[Stefan Krueger]

It doesn't really matter which tool you use to create your shell: DemoShield, C++, whatever. You can also add a link to it in the Add/Remove Programs control panel.
Unless you specify ARPSYSTEMCOMPONENT in the MSIs each of them will get a separate entry in control panel.

P.S. I'm in Germany and my doctor told me to reduce my sweets consumption because of my blood pressure, so I can't be of help in this matter