Whoaaaa (squealing brakes) Sorry please don't get me wrong, I'm *NOT* complaining about it here. Rereading that I can see how the word "hypocrisy" could lead to an assumption about the overall tone and I should have inserted a smiley to clearly convey that that was meant to be a friendly poke in the ribs.
I'm just asking if there's any wix authoring support for it. It was pointed out that it was discouraged/undocumented which I wanted to counter point because I didn't want that to too heavily (negatively) influence anyone's thoughts about potentially adding such support if it not there already. I am quite aware of the fact that wix support for it may go along way towards generating more traction for it and ensuring that it did not disappear in the future and that that might be a *BAD* thing. I would be quite elated if the answer was no we don't support it and we don't ever intend to because we've come up with a much better solution. Maybe those of you more intimately familiar with msi and the wix tool set already have much better alternate suggestions in mind or already in place for achieving the same thing that would make support for that method a completely moot point. Perhaps a shell msi which is nothing more that a bunch of individual localized msis stored as binary blobs and a custom action to extract the correct one and run it? That might be much more flexible while at the same time avoid the transform limitations Derek pointed out and the codepage problems Chesong pointed out. Perhaps this would be tragically inefficient but you have much better ideas... What I'm faced with is trying to come up with a single multi language installer. The guys who do the java versions of our product have an install shield based one for all the non windows platforms so our production guys are asking for the same from us for the .NET version of our product. They are mentally operating at the sku/download level so they don't care about fantastic msi advantages over the install support for other platforms or what our customers who are installing the java stuff on windows anyway are losing by not using an msi based install shield installer. No many how many bats I bring to the game I can't beat that sense into them. At the moment what I have to work with is a VS deployment project generated msi and a bunch of script that does post processing work on it hammering in additional ui buttons that invoke ca's, radio buttons that control conditionally skipping dialog sequences, patches to fix up silent install, etc, etc, etc. Believe me the process is exactly as hideous and fragile as you are imagining while you push back from your keyboard and cringe. I also have everything I think I need to put into the new installer, including all the localized versions of the installer strings. Now I'm faced with piling more investment into this steaming pile or taking a new tact. So I am VERY aware that I am the one asking you guys for help. Also although I'm a newbie here I have taken the time to read almost every msg posted on this list for the 60 or so days so I know that everyone that contributes is doing so voluntarily and that you and Derek must spend tons of hours doing so between both advancing the wix code base and trying to helpfully answer questions here. I have spent lots of hours volunteering on various ASP.NET and continuous integration things so I can truly appreciate what you're doing and I am very thankful for both of your contributions as well as those of others who's names I'm not yet familiar with yet. Appologies for the misunderstanding and many thanks for the great work, commitment, and effort. -john -----Original Message----- From: Rob Mensching [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 9:13 AM To: John Lemire; WiX-users Subject: RE: [WiX-users] Multi-language msi So why don't you go send a comment from the Windows Installer team's blog and tell them to document the feature or quit using it themselves? Complaining to the volunteers that work on the WiX toolset won't do you nearly as much good as commenting directly. It might make you feel better but it certainly doesn't motivate me because there isn't anything we can do in the WiX toolset to document undocumented Windows Installer features. That said I have passed on the localization challenges that people have brought up here to the Windows Installer team several times. However, it is easy for teams at Microsoft to view me as "just one person". Want better odds that your issues get addressed? Get a number of people that agree together and together try to convince the responsible team to address your needs. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Lemire Sent: Monday, August 07, 2006 08:04 To: WiX-users Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Multi-language msi Yes the hypocrisy of which is not lost on us as Microsoft uses this exceptionally handy feature itself (in the windows installer installer instmsi.exe no less) while discouraging it and leaving it undocumented... ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? 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