Thanks for the clarification. (As I have mentioned previously on this
list, I personally do my best to steer clear from *all* non Microsoft
Custom Actions and was unaware of the special CustomActionData
property.)
I would agree that unless you are familiar with the quirks C# is much
easier to write in. (In fact it's what I use every day, and what I would
probably use for preference in most situations). Perhaps it is a case of
group-think, to say "avoid managed code custom actions", but I
understand the reasons behind it having suffered (long before Windows
Installer or the .NET framework came along) with a scenario where an
update to a third party product rendered ours impossible to uninstall or
update. Had there not been the dependency *during the installation* on a
third party component shared by both products then fixing things would
have been much easier.
Of course, many choices made when creating an installation can vary
depending on the customer(s) you are developing for. If it is an
in-house product, or one sold into a situation where good software
management is in place, and you know that a specific version of the
framework will be present then by all means use managed code custom
actions. Similarly if you use a bootstrapper which makes sure the
correct framework version is present and being used it is much less
likely that you will have problems.
As with all "best practices", as long as you understand the potential
risks it may sometimes be more appropriate to choose not to follow them
to the letter. The main reason for reiterating the group-think is to try
and help others not to fall into the same type of nightmare scenario I
have experienced in the past.
Personally, I hope that MS eventually sorts out the problems with
managed code custom actions and makes this discussion irrelevant.
Regards,
Richard
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
Christopher Painter
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 10:32 AM
To: Foster, Richard - PAL; [EMAIL PROTECTED];
wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] FW: passing parameters through custom actions
in C#
`Group Think` may agree that managed code custom actions are bad, but I
certainly don't agree. Writing CA's in C++ compared to C# frankly, is
painful at best. I've done much research in this area and while I will
certainly agree that Installer Class CA's ( InstallUtil) suck, managed
code in general does not have to suck. If adding the CA to the install
in itself created the framework dependency, I'd say that's an issue....
but many, many shops these days are doing .NET development so the odds
are the dependency is already there.
Also the CustomActionData property maps to a property of the same name
as the custom action. So if the deferred CA's name is `testing` then
the immeadiate CA should set a property called `testing`.
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