First, thank you for the excellent points about several of the features that we put in for legacy platforms, but I'd like to politely disagree with the idea that MSI corporate deployments are very rare. Just to provide a different view, as someone who cut their teeth on MSI back in the good old 1.0 days repackaging for corporate deployment and having since been involved in medium and large corporate deployments as well as ensuring that the large corporate deployment pattern was part of the design of several first party installation projects, I can state from experience that the use of Windows Installer is alive and well for corporate deployments. The default application set on my desktop at work is entirely MSI managed by SMS and IME that is not nearly as uncommon as you seem to indicate. Even in the case of Citrix and similar pseudo-virtualization scenarios, the primary method that I have encountered for deployment to those environments (and some of the new patterns I'm having to take into account) is based around MSI.
As has been pointed out fairly often in this thread, installation development and application deployment is far from a narrow field in the Windows ecosystem. The design of a setup has to take into account a huge array of variation in the target platform that leads to a certain level of complexity. As you pointed out, factoring in the huge legacy of quirks of previous operating systems as well as the new features (some of which I'm sure will be considered quirks in five years time :-) ) just adds to that complexity. I would also just like to add a small thanks for the obviously conscious effort to try and keep this thread from devolving into the flame war it could have been. -- --Nathan Stohlmann Minneapolis, MN USA [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 10:30 PM, Mike Dimmick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Windows Installer was designed to support corporate deployment of > applications to shared machines with install-on-demand and roaming profiles, > and to support Windows 95 and up. If you understand that, a lot of the > features and the ICE error reports make sense. The trouble is that this > corporate deployment environment is so rare – even large corporations rarely > use it, largely because many MSIs don't work right in that environment – and > so far away from the common case that most of us are dealing with, namely > installing applications one time for all users of a personal computer that > isn't on a managed network and doesn't roam. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
