InstallSite Blog

Macrovision announces end of life for InstallShield, InstallAnywhere and AdminStudio versions

On September 28, 2007 Macrovision announced the end of life for the following product versions:

• InstallShield Premier and Professional, version 10.5
• InstallShield X Premier, Professional and Express, version 10.0
• InstallShield DevStudio 9
• InstallShield Express 5
• InstallAnywhere 6
• AdminStudio 6

Users of these versions have until December 31, 2007 to upgrade to the latest version at the reduced upgrade price. Support for those versions will also be phased out with full support ending September 28, 2008 and limited support ending April 30, 2009.

If you decide not to upgrade to the latest version I highly recommend you download and save all hotfixes, service packs, add-ons etc. for your version, before they get pulled from the web site. You may also want to save or print important knowledge base articles for future reference.

• Macrovision end of life notice
• Upgrades are available at InstallSite

Using virtual machines or disk images to test setups

Bob Arnson of the WiX team has some recommendations for tresting your setups. He discusses virtual machines vs. disk imaging, and briefly compares some virtual machine software products.

• Test your setups virtually

Comparison of Application Virtualization Solutions

InfoWorld published an article about application virtualization on Windows. It compares three popular solutions: SoftGrid from Microsoft, Altiris SVS from Symantec, and Thinstall.

• On the road to the virtual desktop

Tarma ExpertInstall 3.6 released

Tarma Software Research announces the release of Tarma ExpertInstall 3.6. Tarma ExpertInstall helps you to create installation ("Setup") programs for your own software product. Major new features of Tarma ExpertInstall 3 include support for both Tarma native installers and Windows Installers (MSI), fully editable installer dialogs and dialog sequences, fully editable installer action sequences, and comprehensive localization support.

With Tarma ExpertInstall you can install and remove programs, documents, images, multi-media files, TrueType® and OpenType® fonts, .Net assemblies, ActiveX controls, COM servers, type libraries, WinHelp files, device drivers, services, registry updates, INI files, environment variables, program groups, shortcuts, and third-party tools.

Tarma ExpertInstall is Unicode through-and-through, supports feature and component based installation as well as add-on and update installers and can import MSI databases and merge modules. Version 3.6 introduces Vista-related improvements, new Hindi and Telugu translations and numerous minor improvements.

The development environment is intuitive and easy to use and boasts more than 450 different preflight checks to spot potential problems before you deploy your installation. The Tarma native installer is small (only 75 KB), fast, and has excellent compression, making your installation packages as compact as possible, thus saving download time and disk space.

20% discount code available at InstallSite.

This article is based on a press release from Tarma Software Research Pty.

Security Update for VMware Products

VMware has published critical security updates for VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, VMware ACE, and VMware Player. The updates fix several problems, including vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious program to break out of the virtual machine and attack the host computer.

VMware Security Advisory:

VMSA-2007-0006 Critical security updates for all supported versions of VMware ESX Server, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, VMware ACE, and VMware Player

Get the updates:

VMware Downloads

MSI 4.5 documentation available publicly

As announced in the Windows Installer Team Blog, the documentation for Windows Installer 4.5 (beta) is now avilable on MSDN, without need for registering on Microsoft Connect and accepting any NDAs.

• What's new in Windows Installer 4.5

Information about MSI 4.1 has been pulled from MSDN. It's currently unknown if that means that Microsoft cancelled the plan to ship MSI 4.1 in Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008.

Repackager Certification by Macrovision

Marovision Corp., makers of InstallShield and AdminStudio, respond to a repeated customer request and are now offering Repackager Certification exams. It's a combination of a 5-day training course with a 2-hour test at the end. The course covers the repackaging workflow, ICE rules and validation, custom actions, conflict solving etc. It’s meant for veteran IT professionals and persons who previously took the standard AdminStudio training class. Attendees are encouraged to bring in difficult-to-package applications so Macrovision instructors can work with them to configure them correctly.

• More information
• Register via InstallSite

The course and exam is currently available in United Kingdom and USA only. If you are interested in a similar offering for Germany please let me know.

Installing shell extensions with Windows Installer

James Finnigan of Microsoft plans to build some custom actions for installing shell extensions, and he's looking for use cases and problem reports. So if you are installing shell extsensions such as protocol handlers, schema extensions, shell folders, or file associations, please visit James' blog and post how you did it and what problems you encountered. Hopefully this will result in a set of really good custom actions.

• Installing shell extensions - please complain here