Another Windows Installer Pet Peeve

1. If Windows Installer is Microsoft's “official” installation technology, then why the heck don't they use it and support it better?  It would make our lives a lot easier if Microsoft released a merge module for the .NET Framework, for example.  It's the perfect example of where a merge module is needed.  Instead, we get silent install kludges.

2. If Windows Installer is Microsoft's “official” installation technology, why don't they package all of their own software with it?  Whatever happened to eating their own dogfood?  I see as many projects using Classic Installshield as I do windows installer.  And, as long as we are on the subject, why aren't Microsoft products required to pass their own Windows Logo Compliance requirements?  This would head off many of these issues, as MSI is required for logo compliance on the client.

1 Comment

  • In answer to #1, we shipped the Framework as a merge module prior to the RTM of 1.0, but it caused a number of problems: greatly increasing the size of the install distribution as well as risking deinstallation in a few isolated scenarios. This is coupled with the fact that the Framework is intended as an OS component (see Windows Server 2003) and thus the Windows File Protection requires different approaches for different OS. If that weren't enough, you'd need to ship different Framework versions for each language OS, making the problem even harder. Believe me, the current solution is by no means the worst available :-)



    As for #2, no excuse, except that the vast majority of our apps now use MSI technology: I can't think of the last Microsoft program I came across that was non-MSI...

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