Monday, December 18, 2006, 7:20:37 PM, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> What's the advantage of a .msi over a normal setup program?
Well, certain features of msi are of course useful:
- it is integrated into system and 'knows' about all software that it
had installed and about its dependencies (like rpm in Linux :)
- it automatically maintains the application integrity, able to
reinstall files that got lost;
- part of package may be 'installed on first run' - so it does
not waste disk space until needed;
- it has very good updating capabilities, ranging from applying
patches to uninstalling old versions of application(s) when newer
version is installed.
These capabilities are targeted mainly for corporative entities, where an
administator is responsible for getting a number of copies of software up and
running in the shortest time. Or when a vendor releases a number of
products which depend on each other.
And, like the case of .NET, there are rumors about that no install
technologies except .msi will be supported on Windows in some future.
Beware that WiX itself is a .NET project.
There is also 'msi2xml' project on sourceforge.net (written in C++) that can
convert
.msi to .xml and vice versa.
--
Best regards,
Sergei
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