Tim Anderson's ITWriting

August 1, 2006

Tao of the Windows Installer

If you are in the unfortunate position of needing to understand the Windows Installer in depth, I highly recommend this series of posts from Microsoft's Installer team.

The series started out as a simple list of best practices; it's now up to rule 56 and still going strong (security is yet to come). The installer is so intricate that nothing is ever simple.

My own view is that the installer is too complex, but it's arguable. On the one hand, installation is inherently complex; it's linked to the problem of versioning and dependencies which no operating system has yet solved completely. When you add in the need for centralized administration it is not surprising that the Windows Installer is a tricky piece of work. On the other hand - surely it can't be that difficult to copy some files to a hard drive?

I can't shake off the suspicion that the whole thing could be radically simplified. Tools that wrap the thing are a partial solution; but they can also add complications of their own; products like InstallShield are themselves large and complex.

Personally I've taken to using Visual Studio setup projects and post-processing the generated MSI; I'm sure there's an easier way but it's proved effective so far.