With the new .NET framework API providing such wonderful functionality, everybody is programming in C# or VB.NET except setup developers. There was quite some commotion in the WIX users list on writing managed custom actions. It was finally decided that it is generally harmful to write managed code custom actions as they would depend on .NET Framework and having dependencies for setup is plain bad design. But IMHO, we can use managed code custom actions if we are 100% sure that it would be present...

I was recently reading the article by Marting Fowler on Continuous Integration. Our team has set process to have daily builds of the MSI package along with the binary builds. It would have been an easier task with the WIX Toolset but most of our code still is in InstallShield DevStudio. We have used the InstallShield Standalone Build environment to build our MSI package as a batch job. We have various build machines to build different parts of the software and the Standalone Build environment helps...

I had been off the blogging world for quite some time now. I was so swamped with work that I really could not collect my mind to write anything worthwhile. I recently bumped into a really sticky issue (and continue to remain stuck with that). We have a VSIP enabled COM DLL that uses a lot of ATL RGS code. Some of these values in this RGS file were dependent on some environment variables. Also the path to the satillite DLL and some project items were authored in the RGS file. I tried harvesting registry...