Windows Installer Books

The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer

22 Aug 2004 02:33:28 GMT

It has been a very long time since a new book on Windows Installer has been published. The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer is written primarily to a developer audience, however, it...

Includes many, many things about deployment and administration. This is beneficial to administrators in two respects - it makes it a worthwhile read for administrators and it brings up the awareness in the development community of how their packages should behave properly for enterprise deployment.

Windows Installer 3.0 information is focused in the patching section. The authoring tool examples are Orca and Visual Studio - using these tool examples makes sense for a developer audience as these are the freely available tools for authoring. However, administrators may find it challenging to work the example code with their current tool due to the low level of Windows Installer editing that must be done - in addition, many administrator tools have built-in methods for handling these package authoring requirements.

The only difficulty I found with the book is the flow and chapter organization. In my opinion it reads more like a loosely organized FAQ than a tightly organized tutorial or reference work.

That being said, we all know what it is like to come across the gem of a solution buried in an internet faq or news group. This book definitely merits a spot on every packagers bookshelf!

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The Definitive Guide for Windows Installer Technology for Administrators

13 Nov 2003 01:02:19 GMT

This book covers the basics of Windows Installer Technology as seen from an administrator's perspective. Chapters on authoring tools, internals and deployment round out a good read for getting you started with Windows Installer.

Click here for more information on the ebook.

Administrators Introduction to Application Repackaging and Software Deployment Using Windows I

13 Nov 2003 01:05:27 GMT

My experience with InstallShield books is that they are generally a long, rigorous walkthough of a very specific version of their own tools. The value of the book for application to the technology in general is difficult to pull out of these books because it is mixed with so much product / version specific information in a tutorial format. This made sense when installation technology was all proprietary, but difficult for Windows Installer texts. This book is a big change of direction in that regard - there is a significant portion of general knowledge for administrators and the authoring tool used in these parts of the book is - ORCA!

There is significant value in this book even if you are not a die-hard user of InstallShield's tools. There are also sections that detail how to use InstallShield's products, but they come after a significant investment in general technology discussions and tool independant writing.

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VB/VBA Developer's Guide to the Windows Installer

12 Nov 2003 15:58:35 GMT

Working with the internals of the Windows Installer is a difficult task. Add to it the fact that the predominant reference - the Windows Installer SDK - is very oriented toward C language API calls and you have a regular administrator's nightmare on your hands. The VB/VBA Developer's Guide to the Windows Installer gives explanations and examples that are much more scripting friendly.

It is still aimed primarily at application developers who use the installer to deploy and augment their applications - but at least the explanations and code samples aren't filled with C language include files and cryptic API calls that are difficult to translate into VBScript.

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Getting Started with InstallShield Developer and Windows Installer Setups

12 Nov 2003 15:07:00 GMT

If you are building Windows Installer packages with InstallSheild - you should know about this new book. The book does not cover InstallShield's admin product AdminStudio, however, Administrators can gleen some good information from chapters 3, 13 and 14. These chapters contain a Windows Installer overview and some meaty details about building components. The majority of the book is targetted at InstallShield and the dominant style is a detailed tutorial on how to get up and running on InstallShield Developer 7!

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