MSI is complicated. Setup is complicated. There is a learning curve but once you nail it, it's easy for your users.
The key to MSI is that it's declarative (functional programming), transactional and has standardized support for upgrades, patches, uninstall, repair, silent and so on. Learn how to do all this and you can crank out massively complex, scalable installers with very low defect rates. Try to do that in any procedural (Wise, InstallScript, PowerShell, VBScript, .BAT, NSIS, Inno, whatever..) language and you'll quickly find yourself with tomes of buggy code and inconsistent installation behavior. I did the latter for 6 years before switching to MSI. I've been doing MSI for 10 years. You can take what I say to the bank. ---------------------------------------- From: "Katherine Moss" <katherine.m...@gordon.edu> Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2012 2:46 PM To: "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset. (wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net)" <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: [WiX-users] I have heard that MSI is too complicated from a programmer's prospective Hi guys, Since I am just learning to be a .NET C# programmer, can somebody shed light on why using WiX over something like Inno would be more complicated and why programmers are often less compelled to use WiX? I'm asking this because my friend has got a project he's working on where the main programmer is insistent on using Inno instead of WiX. It's bothering me because if my friend wants his product to be more administrator-friendly and compatible with group policy, doesn't he need to be using MSI technologies? I mean, he wants that administrative/ease-of-deployment across multiple servers/workstations edge, but is he going to get it using Inno? And if not, then what can I say to these people to help dispel the supposed "complications" of Windows Installer? Thanks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
