WiX

Since Oracle has decided to charge enterprise customers with upcomming JDK11 and JRE11 people need to look for alternatives. There is OpenJDK around that can close the gap.

As you may expierienced in past - Oracle has changed the MSI files embedded into their EXE setups in version 8.x a few times and cleaned up their installer a lot. At first thought it was a WTF are they doing there in the middle of 8.x, but on the end it became clear that they cleaned up the 8.x installer only. It was an outgrown mess over the years and full of garbage. However - they broke the ability to deploy it easily. Now after the setup cleanup a lot of knowledge and guessing is required to fix the MSI database and make it installable via AD GPOs. It is clear that they like to sell the customer only enterprise MSI installer that nobody want to pay $ 100K for. With Java 9 they started to hide the MSI file more. The MSI files are no longer extracted to TEMP folder if you run the EXE setup. But it is still an MSI and this goes into C:\Windows\Installer folder. You can still make a snapshot of a virtual machine, install Java and grab the MSI from the Installer folder.

Now with Java 11 and later Oracle plans to release a new major Java version every ~6 months and force all end users to upgrade to the latest version. Java version 8.x is no longer supported after in January 2019 without a payed LTS contract. Long term versions are than only available to enterprise customers. Additionally enterprise users always need to license their servers and client computers running Java. They are no longer allowed to use the end user Java versions. End users are not affected by this change.

A few days ago I found out that the previouly hidden link used to download Skype as MSI setup is broken. The last available version was Skype 7.41.101. The latest 8.x versions (8.28.0.41) seem no longer available as official MSI package. This means enterprise deployment is made impossible as EXE setups cannot deployed via Active Directory GPO deployment. Originally when Skype 8.0 was released it was planed to discontinue the Skype 7 ("Skype Classic") support per 1^th September 2018, but they extended the deadline to 1^th November 2018, until some customer requested features are added back to 8.x. It is not clear if these missing features also include the MSI setup. The learning curve that customers cannot ignored seems not very strong; if we keep the past mobile client fiasco in mind.

Contacted Skype support and they confirmed that MSI setup is not available and they named it no longer supported. They pointed to other solutions like Skype for Business and noted that this team may know where the required MSI is, but they cannot help if it comes to end user Skype.

We need to make sure the meetings can take place. Being surprised in weeks or months by a no longer working Skype client is not really an option. A solution is required as there was news around from a Skype employee named Babs that stated the old Skype Classic 7.x will still work for now, but may break in near future. The current deadline for 7.x is 1th November 2018. You need to install 8.x before this date.

This is a note for all others searching for a XMind - Mind Mapping version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not a developer of XMind, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for the XMind Team to make XMind 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 has been deployed to ~50 machines without any issues. I have not received any feedback from the XMind guys yet, but hope it will see the public light soon.

These are the setup features that have been implemented and can be enabled/disabled via transforms:

This is a note for all others searching for a Notepad++ version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not a developer of Notepad++, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for the Notepad++ Team to make Notepad++ 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.

These are the setup features that have been implemented and can be enabled/disabled via transforms:

This is a note for all others searching for a PDFsam version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I'm not a member of the PDFsam team, but I've created a full-fledged per Machine MSI setup for them to make PDFsam 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.

I have received feedback from the main developer that we will look into it for the next official version. He took over and you can download the latest MSI version of PDFsam Basic from the project homepage.

These are the setup features that have been implemented and can be enabled/disabled via transforms:

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?

Checking JRE can be done with below code. I found this on the net, but it failed for me with WixUI_FeatureTree and WixUI_Mondo setup interfaces. The problem was that the condition has not checked on install only. Therefore I got the condition message also if I tried to modify features and this blocked me from changing installed features. The added Installed OR makes sure this condition is only checked on the very first install and not later. It would otherwise cause serious issues for the user if the application should be removed after the JRE has been uninstalled, but your application not before.

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.