WiX, or Windows Installer XML Toolset, is the first open-source project released by Microsoft. With this tool you can build Windows Installer packages by using the XML format. This does not have a GUI (Graphical User Interface), everything you do is from XML and command line. It is a […]
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In a previous blog post, I’ve posted a small VBScript that can change the summary information for an MSI or MST. But what if you want to use Powershell to achieve that? Well, here is the script As previously stated, each field you want to customize in the […]
Microsoft offers WiSumInf.vbs, which is provided in the Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers. You can use this script like: However, by looking at their example and learning about the WindowsInstaller.Installer object we can create a shorter and simpler one to use. As you can see, each field you […]
In my previous blog posts about how to create a self-installing exe with 7zip SFX Maker and how to create a gui exe for bundles with 7zip SFX maker, I’ve shown how easy it is to create simple but effective installers with this tool. However, to customize further things, for […]
In a previous post, i have shown how to create a self-extracting and self-installing .exe using 7ZIP SFX Maker. But what if you want a GUI (Graphical User Interface) for it? The steps are not so different. In this case i’m using 3 MSIs with one Install.VBS that install […]
If you don’t have a tool for packaging, like Advanced Installer for example, you can create a self-extracting .Exe that runs a command after installation with 7Zip SFX Maker. You can find 7Zip SFX Maker here. Once you have it downloaded and installed there are a few steps to take […]
One interesting situation that i was in a while back was that a customer wanted a big bundle of apps installed on several machines. Upon inspecting the bundle, this was made with an Install.VBS and contained more than 20 apps. Oddly enough, each MSI had an outside media (nope, […]
One downside with MSIs is the repair function. This is a challenge for all IT PROs to find a way to make the repair work when the source media is not present on the machine anymore. While there are some alternatives to repair custom user data or registry, if […]
This script is useful if you want to replace a certain string only in files with a specific extension. In this tutorial we will replace a string “Replace Me” with “This is replaced” only in files that have the “.txt” and “.csv” extensions, and another string “Hello” with “Bye” in […]
Haven’t used this in a while, but i’ve stumbled across an exe installer that requires reboot, and after reboot it continues the installation of some user MSI. However, during reboot the MSI installation would fail. The MSI was afterwards deleted. So how can i make a log to see […]
For a while i had some issues in a infrastructure of many users installing per-user MSI’s. Problem is, when the same application is packaged and deployed in the infrastructure, this is done to be a per-machine installation and, it doesn’t update/remove the per-user MSI because you are executing the […]
I’ve encountered some applications that, during installation, change the default printer for the users on the machine, regardless if it’s installed from an admin account or system account. To prevent this, you might want to look into the MSI custom actions, but if you don’t have that option, then […]