MSI

This is a note for all others searching for a FastStone Capture version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not an employee of FastStone Soft, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for them to make FastStone Capture deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it's available now. No need to wrap suxxx NSIS installer into an MSI any longer.

It was me a pleasure to help these guys and they are currently doing their in-house testing, but as these guys have been proven to be are really open minded and thankful - I'm sure they are able to provide you the new MSI setup before it get's published on their site in future. I cannot publish the setup here as this is not Open Source.

Like me you may need to deploy Fonts in your Enterpise network via Active Directory.

In past we have seen some tools on the net that made this Font installation an easy task, but all of them have faded away or have been commerialized with questionable feature lists in basic payed version. It took me an unacceptable hard time to find the way to go as the search results give tons of bad results and none of these tools around is really easy to use. I wished I would have found a GUI tool that works like drag and drop, browse registry and other stuff to create at least easy type setups, but this seems only to be a very big wish. After some weeks with MSI and WiX I understand more and more that such a tool cannot be easy - except it would be very limited in functionality and what is more worse than using 5 tools in a long term view? In a small world you may only need a Font installer, but later you need much more and it's better to learn MSI and WiX the hard way. You cannot get around if you need to deploy software in daily business.

Multilingual user interface (MUI) setups are really common in todays world. Mostly seen with NSIS setups. If your software is multilingual you don't need to maintain tons of setups (aka - one MSI for every language). Nevertheless the below is officially not supported by Microsoft, it's possible and widly used - also by Microsoft. The most popular software I came across in the last days is Apples Safari 5.x browser. I'm sure if you search more, you will find much more setups.

See Available Language Packs for the available LangID's and cultures.

How are the multilingual user interface MSIs created?

Everytime I need to install Microsoft Orca for editing and/or reviewing MSI files or to create transforms (.MST), I'm searching again where Microsoft have hidden this tool... :-) If you do not like Orca you can also use InstEdit. In opposite of some comments on the Internet; Orca is not gone and it's still downloadable!

Required:

Sometimes applications are creating files after an MSI installation has completed that are therefore not visible to the MSI setup. These files may need to be removed before install or at least on uninstall to free up disk space and for other cleanup reasons. In WiX Toolkit 3.6 and later there is a new feature named RemoveFolderEx to solve this problem very easily.

In case that you install or uninstall an application you are able to recursively remove directories without writing strange CustomActions for this task. For install I'm using it to upgrade from a manual "copy" type installation to an MSI version. It's also a must if you do not have any idea about the file names created in the application directories or simply for files left behind for unknown reasons. There are a few requirements if you'd like to use the tag in your WXS scripts.

If you create MSI setups with WiX Toolkit you should be aware that tags in your .WXS file will cause your resulting MSI file to grow by the size of EXE file linked in SourceFile attribute.

Don't do this:

<icon id="example.ico" sourcefile="SourceDir\MyApp.EXE" />

Always use small .ICO files.