First I'd like to say the former setup developer managed to voilate all that stuff. :-) I've seen Windows Installer setup developers do some violating also so it's not limited to InstallShield. :-)
That said, yes, I've had to write many of these 'forced uninstall' utilities in my time. It comes with the territory when trying to do repackaging and SMS deployment for legacy applications that are already in the wild. Whatever you do does need to be done prior to costing. Can you use a bootstrapper/chainer to run it first? Can you have an appsearch/launch condition that detects it's not been done yet and gate on it? Perhaps tell the user to runn the cleanup program first? Christopher Painter, Author of Deployment Engineering Blog Have a hot tip, know a secret or read a really good thread that deserves attention? E-Mail Me --- On Tue, 4/21/09, lesterbangs <datapa...@gmail.com> wrote: > From: lesterbangs <datapa...@gmail.com> > Subject: [WiX-users] Cleaning up a messy InstallShield > To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net > Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 5:13 PM > > I am converting an installer written in InstallShield 12 > (non-MSI based) to > WiX. The InstallShield one manages to violate nearly > every best practice, > so even forcing the end-user to do a complete uninstall of > it before running > the MSI leaves the system in a potential mess. Some > of the things I have to > deal with are: > > * non-DLLs are being referenced in the HKLM\...\SharedDlls > registry key > * regasm, gacutil, regsvr32 and friends used to register > DLLs > * no matching "unregister" command on registered DLLs at > uninstall > > I'm thinking of writing either a CA or a standalone utility > to stream into > the binary table to clean up all the known leftover junk > which would be run > at the beginning of the MSI installation. It would > have to be done in an > immediate action, but since this is making modifications to > the target > machine it should be set as deferred. That won't work > though, because it > would remove the (correct) changes that the MSI installer > makes to the > system. > > In this case, is it ok to run this cleanup procedure as an > immediate action? > What are the potential pitfalls of authoring the MSI in > this way? Do I have > any other alternatives apart from manually requiring the > cleanup to be a > separate step uninstall-old/reinstall-new process? > > Thanks in advance. > -- > View this message in context: > http://n2.nabble.com/Cleaning-up-a-messy-InstallShield-tp2672846p2672846.html > Sent from the wix-users mailing list archive at > Nabble.com. > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside > and > around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and > save > $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San > Francisco. > 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. > Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stay on top of everything new and different, both inside and around Java (TM) technology - register by April 22, and save $200 on the JavaOne (SM) conference, June 2-5, 2009, San Francisco. 300 plus technical and hands-on sessions. Register today. Use priority code J9JMT32. http://p.sf.net/sfu/p _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
