Include redistributable msi into my setup

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Anna - 05 Sep 2005 06:54 GMT

Hi,

I've created a setup project for my windows application. It use the
bootstrapper to install the .Net framework 1.1. It all works fine. I have a
problem: I need to check whether a particular software is installed on
target machine and if not - run the redistributable runtime msi for this
software from my installer. The good news is that it doesn't matter whether
this software is installed before or after my application install is
completed. It would be nice to install it before my application is installed
but not critical.

I included a launch condition to check whether the software is installed on
the target machine but I don't know what to do next, i.e. how run the install
in case the condition returns false. Whatever I found on the internet is
either goes down to manual settings with Orca or just says do such and such
but doesn't explain how.

I thought maybe I should use a custom action and just launch msiexec.exe
with the path to my runtime in AfterInstall but some sites say that you can't
run msi from another running msi. I am totally confused.

Any help will be highly appreciated.

Anna

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Phil Wilson - 05 Sep 2005 18:34 GMT

You can't launch another MSI from a Visual Studio custom action. That's
because you can't have two simultaneous MSI installs running at the point
where VS sequences its custom actions. OnAfterInstall is a bit of a
misnomer. It's not called after the install, it's actually called at the end
of the Install custom action, so it happens in pretty much the same place as
the Install custom action.

You can't do what you want to do with Visual Studio setup projects. What you
want to do is more easily handled by a launch program that looks for the
existing MSI file, launches it, then launches yours. VS setup projects just
don't offer IDE support of the things you're trying to do. If you're doing a
lot of this kind of thing, VS probably isn't what you should be using. There
are a bunch of tools here, some free, some not, but you seem to be
continually trying to do things that Windows Installer will do, but not VS
setup projects.
http://www.codeproject.com/dotnet/dotNetInstaller.asp
http://installsite.org/pages/en/msi/authoring.htm

Signature

Phil Wilson
[Microsoft MVP-Windows Installer]
Definitive Guide to Windows Installer
http://apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=280

> Hi,
>
[quoted text clipped - 27 lines]
>
> Anna

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Include redistributable msi into my setup

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