InstallSite Blog

Software Giveaways: MSDN Premium Subscription, SnagIt

I've got some software licenses that I plan to give away to members of the community:

One-year subscription of MSDN Premium with Visual Studio Team Suite (provided by Microsoft Corp). MSDN Premium includes:

• Operating systems, servers, office applications etc. which you can use for development and testing purposes
• Additionally one license of Office 2007 Ultimate for general use. Besides the typical office applications Office Ultimate also includes Publisher, InfoPath, OneNote, Project, Sharepoint Designer, Groove, and Visio.
• Visual Studio Team System 2008
• 4 technical support incidents

You'll receive updates to these products during the one year subscription. After the year you can continue to use these products even if you don't renew (but you won't receive any more updates). I consider MSDN an essential resource for any developer on Windows. More about MSDN. I'm very excited because this is a quite valuable gift: the retail price for MSDN Premium is approximately $11,000 !

SnagIt (provided by TechSmith Corp.). SnagIt is a powerful screen capture, editing and annotation tool. It captures graphics, text, automatically scrolls web pages and can preserve hyperlinks in web screenshots (or add your own hotspots) using Flash. I'm using SnagIt frequently to add screenshots to my forum posts. You'll receive a perpetual license for SnagIt 9 which includes minor updates for all 9.x versions. More about SnagIt. The regular price of SnagIt is approximately $50.

Nomination and drawing

If you know someone who should receive one of these licenses as a reward for his or her contributions to the installer community, please send an e-mail to giveaway@installsite.org . You are also welcome to nominate yourself. Please include the person's contact information and describe why you nominated him or her. I will then contact the nominees to confirm whether they agree to the rules of this giveaway, and which software they would like to receive if they get selected (for instance someone may already have a MSDN subscription and therefore prefer SnagIt).

The deadline for nominations is 31 August 2008.

If there are more candidates than available software packages the winners will be selected based on their community contributions and a random drawing.

Everyone may participate. Void where prohibited by law. The final decision will be made in my sole discretion and is non-disputable. All costs like taxes, customs or whatever are your responsibility. I will not be responsible for items lost in the mail. The name, location (city, state, country) and information about community activities of the candidates and winners may be published (please let me know if you don't want your information published).

The software is intended for your own use, it is not for resale (NFR). The license agreements of the respective software apply.

Windows Installer Version Matrix

This table shows released Windows Installer versions that are included or available as redistributables for the different versions of Windows. Pre-release or beta versions are not listed.

The data have been collected from various sources. If you find any inaccuracies or have additional information that should be added, please let me know: skrueger (at) installsite.org

This table is also available in my MSI FAQ (English / German) where you can always get the latest version.

LINQ to MSI

LINQ stands for Language-Integrated Query and enables you to directly query databases in .NET programming languages. In a series of blog posts Bart De Smet is writing a query provider to use LINQ for MSI databases. He emphasizes that it's a sample only, and I must admit that I don't understand all of it. But if you are a .NET programmer working with Windows Installer you may find this interesting.

The blog posts so far:

• LINQ to MSI - Part 0 - Introduction
• LINQ to MSI - Part 1 - Interop
• LINQ to MSI - Part 1 bis - Interop with SafeHandles
• LINQ to MSI - Part 2 - Queryable without an I

Tarma Installer 5.2 released

Tarma Software Research announces the release of Tarma Installer 5.2. Tarma Installer 5 helps you to create installation ("Setup") programs for your own software product. Major new features of Tarma Installer 5 include support for x64 Windows versions, .Net support, support for Windows side-by-side assemblies and Windows mobile installers, fully editable installer dialogs and dialog sequences, fully editable installer action sequences, and comprehensive localization support. The 5.2 release adds full support for Windows mobile installers.

With Tarma Installer 5 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.

The Tarma development environment, its project files, and the Tarma installation database and Setup program are Unicode-based from the ground up to ensure that all localization remains intact. Tarma installer 5 supports feature and component based installation as well as add-on and update installers and can import MSI merge modules.

The development environment is intuitive and easy to use and boasts more than 500 different preflight checks to spot potential problems before you deploy your installation. Tarma Installer 5 is small, fast, and has excellent compression, making your installation packages as compact as possible, thus saving download time and disk space.

To evaluate Tarma Installer 5, users can download an unlimited trial version from the company's website.

• Product information and trial download
• 20% discount coupon for InstallSite users

(Text based on a press release from Tarma Software Research Pty)

WinINSTALL acquired by Scalable Software

Scalable Software Limited, a leader in IT Asset Lifecycle Management solutions, announced on June 30, 2008 that it has completed the acquisition of the WinINSTALL® Desktop Management business from Attachmate of Seattle, Wash. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Rod Trent writes in his myITforum blog: "The WinInstall software management application has been passed around more than Aunt Betty during an early 70’s key party". Well, the history as far as I recall it:

• WinINSTALL was originally developed by OnDemand Software.
• When the free WinINSTALL 2000 LE edition was included on the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server CD, the product was owned by Veritas.
• On June 28, 2002 it was re-acquired by OnDemand Software, Inc.
• On March 7, 2006 AttachmateWRQ (now Attachmate Corporation) acquired the company and the product. On a side note: Thoma Cressy Bravo (TCB), the investment firm that acquired InstallShield from Macrovision, also has an investment interest in Attachmate.
• On June 30, 2008 Scalable Software LLC acquired the WinINSTALL business unit from Attachmate.

From the web site it seems like WinINSTALL isn't exactly up to date to the latest techologies. When it says that it "supports the latest MSI schema" that probably doesn't include MSI 4.5. The system requirements for the WinINSTALL Console list Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. WinINSTALL ships with MSDE 8 but also supports SQL Server 2000 and Oracle 9i. No mention of SQL Server 2005, Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008.

More information:

• Press release
• Scalable Software LLC homepage
• WinINSTALL product page (with free WinINSTALL LE download)