I'm looking forward to this webinar because it's going to discuss a question that I'm also asking myself these days: "Is application virtualization the future of software installations?". Of course, the final answer will be "InstallShield" because it supports Microsoft App-V and it's the product that Flexera Software wants to sell. But I hope they'll cover some interesting points along the way. Some bullet points about the content of the webinar: Why software

Mark Bishof, President and CEO of Acresso Software, today informed customers that the company will change its name to Flexera Software effective October 12, 2009. They plan to issue a formal press announcement about this on October 13. But in his e-mail he already hinted about the reason: "Under the new corporate brand, Flexera Software, we can fully market, service, and support our products in all geographies where we do business today and where we plan to over the coming years." So maybe

When InstallShield 2010 was released, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 were still in the Release Candidate (RC) state. Acresso now published Service Pack 1 to support the release versions (RTM) of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and the included MSI 5 engine. SP1 also includes some enhancements for Windows Mobile installations and for Microsoft's App-V application virtualization. Caveat: SP1 adds additional tables to the project file. When you open a project file in InstallShield 2010

On September 8th, 2009 Caphyon Ltd. announced the latest edition of its Windows Installer authoring tool. This is the fifth feature update in this year. Since each Advanced Installer purchase includes 6 months of maintenance (optionally 30 months) you get an average of three free updates. New and improved features in Advanced Installer 7.2 include: Install Windows Mobile applications from the desktop through ActiveSync Transforms Wizard to create MST transforms capturing user input during an install

One of the new features in version 5 of the Windows Installer runtime is support for hyperlink controls on setup dialogs. Remember that MSI 5 is only available on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, but there's no redistributable for down-level platforms. In most cases when introducing new features, the MSI team made sure they don't break your setup on older runtime versions. For instance, older MSI versions simply ignore new tables that they can't use. This enables developers to create

This problem was brought up in a question on the InstallSite Forum and is also mentioned in a blog post by Gauravb (who appears to be a Microsoft employee). The typical symptom is missing or not updated files after you install a Small or Minor Update to your application (Major Upgrades are not affected). In the installer log file you'll notice that some features have been switched to "advertised" state and instead of being installed locally. The actual cause is noted in the SELMGR error

Rob Mensching is the lead of the Windows Installer XML ( WiX ) toolset, an open source tool to create Windows Installer (MSI) setups. I his day job he's employed at Microsoft, and as another side project he wrote his own blog software . Apparently he still has some additional spare time ;-) so he started RobMensching.com LLC to offer software installation consulting services for the Windows Installer and WiX toolset. As part of his consulting business, Rob offers to review .msi packages and

Microsoft will ship the full Windows 7 with Internet Explorer in Europe, instead of the previously proposed “Windows 7 E” version without any browser. In June, Microsoft had announced that they would remove Internet Explorer from Windows 7 in order to “comply with European competition law” as they said. As a side effect, users in the EU would not have been able to do an in-place upgrade from Vista to Windows 7. This decision caused protest from columnists, consumers and also from the European Union

Currently there are many Twitter posts suggesting the Windows Installer Clean Up Utility. This concerns me and I want to clarify some things about it. I think these tweets might have been triggered by a blog article that Karl L. Gechlik posted recently: Clean up your PC with Windows Installer Clean Up Utility The Windows Installer CleanUp Utility (MSICU) is a last resort to work around problems with broken or partially installed Windows Installer (MSI) packages if the regular measures like uninstalling

In MSI 5 there’s a new property MSIFASTINSTALL that can be set on the command line or in the Property table to speed up large install packages. It’s a combination of flags that will avoid creation of a system restore point, skip some costing tasks, reduce the frequency of progress messages, or any combination of these. Alex Verboon has run some performance tests to see how much installation time is reduced by setting the MSIFASTINSTALL property. He doesn’t explicitly specify which build of Windows