Rob Mensching's Blog - page 33

As I noted a few months ago, the Windows Installer is a declarative installation engine not a procedural installation engine. That means if you are going to extend the installation engine (which is what custom actions essentially do) then you should follow the same principles the engine follows. Namely, your custom action should read data out of a table and act based on those declarative instructions.

If you follow the world of the Windows Installer at all, I'm sure you have noticed that the Windows Installer 4.5 Beta was made available last week.

Jenny is out of town tonight so I've been catching up on my "concept reading". After grilling dinner (teriyaki chicken) and eating while skimming through the Ruby on Rails site I decided it was time to put something "fun" on the Media Center before continuing my MVC vs. MVP conceptual dive.

The title of this blog entry is a concept that I kept trying to sneak into one of my earlier posts on this "Zen and the Art of Custom Actions" thread. I finally gave up trying to make it a bullet point and now here we are. What convinced me that there was a full topic to be covered was when I realized I meant two things when I said "Custom actions are (generally/typically) an admission of failure."

Setup

Zataoca: Classes of Custom Actions

Continuing the Zen and the Art of Custom Actions thread, I thought I'd post a mostly formed thought. When I'm presented with the need to write a custom action I often mentally classify the work into one of three or so different buckets.

WiXSetup

SDD before TDD?

David Aiken has an interesting blog post about adopting TDD (Test Driven Development, for those of you have been living in a cave) for his next project. In said blog post, David suggests that before even writing tests that one should write the setup logic.

WiX

WiX toolset in SlickEdit 2007

I've never really used SlickEdit but had a few friends that just lived in the editor. Anyway, tonight I tripped across this blog entry that talks out some integration tricks you can do with .wxs files in SlickEdit. If you use SlickEdit and the WiX toolset you might check it out.

Setup

Zen and the Art of Custom Actions

I have been asked a great many times to talk about how to create Windows Installer custom actions. Each time I've dismissed the request noting that it would take tons of time to organize my thoughts on the topic and actually write them all down.