I didn’t plan to start my discussion about the new installation technology in Windows 8, AppX, with this topic. However, a quick scan through this morning’s email from wix-users prompted me to start here.
Original post by Rob Mensching
I joined the Developer Division almost 2 years ago. When I announced the move I spoke about my new focus on the short and long term of setup on Windows. In the Windows 8 keynote and the Developer Preview bits available now you can see the results of both. It all starts in the keynote when Antoine Leblond comes on stage and fires up Visual Studio.
Original post by Rob Mensching
Below are more details about the issue for those of you that are interested.
.NET 4 depends on a Windows Update which is documented in these KB articles:
Win7 = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958488
Vista = http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956250
Aaron Stebner did a good job in root causing this down to an issue with Windows Update on the machine. He documented his analysis here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2010/12/29/10110053.aspx
I took Aaron’s investigation a step further and was able to find a concrete example of where I could get Windows Update to return “not applicable” on a machine where an update should have been applicable. On this machine TrustedInstaller.exe was not present on the machine which is critical for correct behavior of Windows Update.
I then found that there are numerous places on the web that are telling people to disable, remove, or in other ways kill trusted installer. This is a bad idea and appears to be the root cause of a lot of these issues. Products that depend on your copy of Windows being up to date will all exhibit weird behaviors if the update cannot be applied. The workarounds I’m seeing for this issue are scary and likely have unintended consequences such as future updates failing to install and putting your machine in a state that Microsoft can’t support. I dont recommend taking ownership of system files, hacking files out of installer packages and manually updating them.
Original post by Peter Marcu
Original post by Peter Marcu
There is a property in Add/Remove Programs (called "Programs and Features" in Vista+ but setup developers in the know call it "ARP") that can specify the install location for your application. Like most properties in ARP, it’s questionable what value InstallLocation provides. However, it’s there and some things look for it and the Windows Installer provides a standard way to set it, so let’s talk about how to do so with the WiX toolset.
Original post by Rob Mensching
If you’ve dealt wit the Windows Installer at all, you know the fastest way to figure out what went wrong is to look at a verbose log file. The normal log file doesn’t provide enough information to really diagnose things going wrong, so I always generate a verbose log file like so:
Original post by Rob Mensching
In .NET 4 we have quite a few deployment options available for redistribution. There are basically 2 pivots. The Client/Full profiles and 32bit/32+64bit packages.
Here are the four redistributable options and their corresponding sizes.
| Redistributable | Size |
| 32bit Client Profile | 28.8 MB |
| 32bit Full | 35.3 MB |
| 32+64bit Client Profile | 41 MB |
| 32+64bit Full | 48.1 MB |
The Client Profile is targeted to contain the parts of the .NET Framework that are used by most client applications and gives people the option to carry a little less payload if they use less of the Framework.
The 32+64bit packages are designed to give the option of installing either profile on any target machine regardless of OS architecture. On the other hand, if someone is targeting a pure 32bit customer segment, the 32bit package gives the option of reduced size with reduced breath of deployment.
Original post by Peter Marcu
Over the past few years I have been asked more and more which version of .NET is included in the operating system. The following chart shows from .NET 2.0 onward, which version of .NET is included in both the Client and Server Windows operating systems.
Note that this diagram also shows which pieces are optional and whether or not they are on by default in that particular OS.
Original post by Petermarcu