John Vottero wrote: > Reposting this message at regular intervals (either manually or > automatically) does no good whatsoever. That doesn't change the fact that it's a well-written message.
> If there are problems with the > Installer based classes they should be reported to Microsoft so that the > problems can be fixed. > Easy fix: Make Installer sealed.<g> Running arbitrary code during installation is bad. It's self-reg, except worse. The entire design of MSI is based on the idea of describing your setup and letting MSI interpret the description. Running code is bad and should be avoided whenever possible. > If you read the documentation for the Installer classes, it never > implies that they are merely developer hacks that shouldn't be used in a > production environment. In fact, Visual Studio provides the > InstallUtilLib custom action to call Installer classes from an MSI. > True. And it's an excellent example of why many folks suggest avoiding .vdproj. > Don't all custom actions have the potential to break reference counting? > Why use the reference counting argument against one custom action but > not others? > Yes they do -- and QuietExec is often abused. But there's a difference between running arbitrary code in a CA and running a well-designed CA whose operations are described via data in tables in the package. Quite simply, it's hard to do good CAs. Even if you were to argue that there's too much coding overhead to do declarative setup, it's hard to argue against uninstall and rollback CAs. Yet often it's exactly that kind of resilience that people skip when writing one-off CAs. We see it all the time, even inside Microsoft. (That's why "but VS does it" isn't much of an excuse.) > Installer classes have way too much momentum and too many supporters > within Microsoft to be ignored, it's time for WiX and Windows Installer > to figure out how to support them. > Or lobby the supporters to come to their senses. -- sig://boB http://bobs.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
