Arnaldo Sandoval
 I began my run in the IT field back in 1975 while at the University getting my Industrial Engineer Bachelor Degree; using Wang Basic language and Burroughs 6700's FORTRAN and COBOL, working as a Teacher’s assistance for a fist full of dollars, since then I had worked in four different countries: Venezuela, USA, Mexico and Australia, the Business Basic Language the main skill expected from me; learning Unix, C, PASCAL, Uniplex, WordPerfect, 20/20 in the lates 80s, Sybase in the early 90s, Basis BBx in the 90s, Microsoft’s VBA in the mid 90s, Visual Basic version 3.0 around 1996; moved to Australia in the lates 90s, here I kept learning, Transoft’s Universal Business Language, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Basic .Net; working for a major Australian company in the building material market. I had worked for Computers Manufacturing companies (MAI Basic Four after reading the Wikepedia definition, it feels good being an active part of the industry), and high rollers companies (DOLE, Pepsico when they operated Pizza Hut, KFC, Taco Bell and PFS, Boral Limited), roaming the world while doing so, exposed to cutting edge technologies of their time, creating it when the opportunity required so. I currently look after an Oracle data warehouse, sourcing its data from four or five legacy applications, servicing Crystal Reports and Cognos Cubes, developed VB and Net solutions; I could claim the phrase “I had been there, done that” suits me like a globe, always addressing any challenge with an engineer mind, which is different to an IT mindset.
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INTRODUCTION
Installer Classes are great tools that you can develop and integrate with your Setup and Deployment Projects in order to perform additional tasks while running any application's installation or un-installation process, thru its MSI file.
Visual Studio .Net supports for Installer Classes dates back to the .Net Framework 1.0 (VS.Net 2002) This article focuses in its latest incarnation within VS.Net 2005.
An Installer Class contains code written by you that takes care of many things required to properly install your application on the end user's Target Machine; you can write an Installer Class using your favourite development language, i.e. Vb.Net, C#, C++, etc; this article's examples are written in C#.
There are very few limitations of the things an Installer Class could do. Perhaps the developer's knowledge imposes the major constraints (or the author's as we don't claim to know everything); the list below includes many of the things an Installer Class is able to do:
- Change folder permissions.
- Run your application after installation.
- Create folders required by your application.
- Update the application's config file with installation time parameters.
- Send emails.
- Write entries to the Target Machine's eventlog.
- Install database schemas.
- Windows Services (which, if we follow the existing procedures to deploy them, we are using Installer Classes already).
- etc, etc, etc
Setup and Deployment Projects can reference as many Installer Classes as required. the Installer Class could be part of your own application's class collection or a stane alone DLL. It will be up to the developer and his/her organization rules to decide how to develop and deploy installer classes.
SCOPE
This document is based on VS.Net 2005 deployment projects, explaining as much as possible about Installer Classes and their integration to Setup and Deployment project's Custom Actions.; There are not too many differences between Setup and Deployment projects between Visual Studio 2003 and 2005, and based on this we may claim the information found on this article should help you to implement Installer Classes using Visual Studio 2003.
The document contains the following sections:
- Requirements
- Terminology
- How to create an Installer Class
- Un-written rules
- Unpleasent features
- Using these events (about Installer Class events)
- Using the Commit event to change the target directory permissions.
- Using the Uninstall event to clean the target directory
- Where is the "NT AUTHORITY\SERVICE" account coming from?
- Exceptions and Exception handling in your installer class.
- Adding user interfaces (forms) to your installer class.
- Launching your application after installation.
- Conclusions.
- References.
REQUIREMENTS
It will be nice if you have Visual Studio 2005, and a project you want to deploy in order to practice the concepts covered by this document, as well as Virtual PC. Keep in mind that in the early stages of learning how to use Installer Classes you could create a crippled deployment package, which will never install or uninstall.
TERMINOLOGY
- Target Machine is the PC or workstation your project will be installed on.
- Developer Machine is your PC, the one you use to develop your solution and create a deployment project.
- Setup and Deployment Projects are specialized projects that install your solution on a target machine.
- Custom Action an external process written by the developer that is run by the deployment project at installation time when the installation is about to finish.
- MSI Microsoft Installer file, this files are generated by the Setup and Deployment projects.
HOW TO CREATE AN INSTALLER CLASS
- Create a new project using the Class Library template, the project name for this procedure will be MyInstallerClassDll
Add a new Installer Class to the project MyInstallerClassDll by clicking on Project, Add Class, select the Installer Class template, you may enter any name, the name we will use in this procedure is MyInstallerClass.
Your IDE should look like the one shown below:
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