A good question about Burn was raised in the comments on my blog entry about Burn yesterday. The tiny executable that downloads the bulk of the installation content is great when you want to install on your computer. However, if you need to distribute the installation to many machines, like most corporations do, downloading from the Internet is more expensive than downloading from a corporate server. Fortunately, we have a solution for this scenario.

Burn will only download files from the Internet that it cannot find locally. That means you can download the files once and copy them to a network share or burn to CD/DVD (if you prefer sneaker net) for sharing in your corporate environment. The only tricky part is figuring out what files go where. Enter the "-layout" switch.

The "-layout" switch instructs Burn to download the installation content and create a complete directory layout. That layout will ensure Burn won't need to access the Internet later. Unfortunately, as you can see in SFBUG:3011150, the "-layout" switch isn't implemented yet. This is a good example of one of those smaller things we'll be addressing after the large work items are completed this month.

It's clear there is a lot of excitement around Burn so keep the feedback flowing and I'll keep the code coming.