Take the Windows Application Platform Team survey

  • Articolo

Hey all,

The Windows engineering teams are putting together plans for how application installation and servicing will work in future versions of the operating system. We would like to take this opportunity to hear from you to better understand your current pain points and needs going forward.

We have put together a survey to collect your valuable feedback. We hope you will take this opportunity to tell Microsoft what you feel are the needs and priorities to take into consideration to improve the overall application setup & deployment experience.

Sincerely,

Windows Application Platform team

[Author: Zainab Hakim]
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. Use of included script samples are subject to the terms specified at https://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2008
    PingBack from http://mstechnews.info/2008/11/take-the-windows-application-platform-team-survey/

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 23, 2008
    While I agree .msi is difficult, I have to take issue. Long filename support only appeared in NT 3.1 /Win 95 (1993/5 respectively) Mike

  • Anonymous
    November 24, 2008
    Q1:  Why can't I open an Oracle Database with Access? Q2:  Not every setup developer has resources to compile DLLs.  MSI Supports that anyway through external UI handlers. Q3:  You don't, but more specifically, why not?  It doesn't hurt anyone.

  • Anonymous
    November 25, 2008
    THANKS FOR YOUR SUPORT HOPE I CAN HANDLE WINDOW

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2008

  • Why were all the questions from the survey asked twice?
  • Why is the Windows Installer team not providing a decent installation editor for creating installer packages? Orca is not a solution, Visual Studio's Installer project has still the basic functionality since the first release of the installer plugin for Visual Interdev 6.0 and Wix is still in beta if you want the latest features of msi.
  • Why did I still see the suggestion (during the pdc talk) to create a setup.exe?

  • Anonymous
    December 07, 2008
    You've probably already seen this , but in case you haven't: Microsoft is currently running a

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2009
    Three suggestions:

  1. (quite specific): teach windows installer to support xml files on per-setting basis, same as .ini files. This is long, long overdue.
  2. Microsoft might want to promote good practices in creating installations, same as it promotes development in Visual Studio. While there are huge efforts advertising new features for developers, conferences, seminars, webcasts, etc., etc., the activities related to authoring installations are close to non-existing. Meanwhile, according to IBM research, 30% of support calls are attributed to issues that could be avoided by good installation.
  3. And speaking of (2), it would be not bad if Microsoft itself showed an example of professional usage of Installer technology. So far, it has been showing exactly the opposite - which is obvious to anybody who knows how to look inside of an MSI package, not to mention to validate it. The insane setup of Office 2007 is probably the most notable example, when there's no day on installation-related forums that yet another pure soul is not asking how the heck can this be deployed, and the answer is in pointing to several not exactly trivial articles in MSKB each many pages long. Or look at all these mutually incompatible dotnet frameworks, where each one has cleanup utility and cleanup MSKB article explaining how to clean up the mess left behind - after successful uninstallation, it should be noted. Now practically every major product has its own cleanup article(s) and utility - sql server, visual studio, you name it. It would be not bad if Microsoft showed the example not only by creating installation standards (ICE validation) but actually enforcing them first in their own installations.

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2009
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2009
    Ed's #7 is most obviously evidenced by the contents of Installer's log file. I remember during the beta of 4.5 I even posted a bug with the example of the log of some managed advertising installation, as I recall, that did not say what was being installed, why was it being installed, for what purpose, and what was the result.

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2009
    I am running Vista 64 (SP1) and have been plagued by the 1719 error.  Lots of people seem to be having this problem and Microsoft doesn't seem to be addressing it.  I see proported fixes for XP, but none of them work for me on Vista 64. I refuse to believe that re-installing Vista is the only solution.  Can someone tell me how to fix this?  I've tried upgrading to 4.5 and still have the same problem.  Help!