Installing and configuring the product on a Windows computer
I am working on a .NET 3.5 project which consists of a web application and a windows service. They both need to be deployed to the server.
I created an msi package using Wix 3 that installs application files, creates shortcuts and registers a service.
The next task will be the following:
- Post-installation step to configure a Windows service using the wizard's GUI
- Pre-installation step to load installation options from file
- Pre- un installation step to back up the configuration to a file
I see two options in front of me:
- Tweak msi to do what i want with custom actions
- Create a wrapper for msi (Setup.exe) that will handle all user tasks and silently run the msi package in the background using msiexec
Perfectly. I would like to go with option 2. What are your thoughts?
Any recommendation is welcome.
Thank,
Arnie
source to share
The msi wrapper will not be able to handle task # 3 if they are uninstalled using Add / Remove Programs or msiexec using the product ID. I would go with a custom action or a side utility that msi might spawn.
It depends on the amount of configuration required for maintenance. For some of our small config files that just need the server name updated in the connection string, we use the util: XmlFile element to update the file at install time.
We also have a configuration utility that has more to do with what we conditionally run at the end of the installation with
To load the settings from a file, you can do this with a custom action, and then update the config files on installation using the XmlFile or custom actions using those settings. Or make "boot options from file" a gui wizard option and run this post.
source to share