Collection of Useful Posts

There are several methods to uninstall the existing older versions of an application e.g. Script, MSI upgrade table, SCCM deployment conditions. We are here discussing the method using Upgrade table. Upgrade table can be used effectively to detect and uninstall the previous versions of a MSI based application provided the upgrade code is known. Here is an example on populating Upgrade Table: Locate the U pgradeCode in Property Manager . Remember this could either be same or different in previous version and if it is different then grab the code from previous version. Go to the Upgrade Table in Direct Editor . Copy the upgrade code to its column. Populate the Version columns based on requirement (consider all the digits as per previous MSI versions). Attribute column needs to be configured with appropriate bit flag for corresponding upgrade behavior. Refer to  Upgrade Table  to calculate the proper bit flag. In example, 768 is the sum of 256+512 which m...

In previous parts of this series we looked at the App-V 5.0 package format, how it sits on our client OS in the file system cache and how the registry works. So that’s all well and good but what about when about when users make customisations to packages, how do we handle state changes? There are two types of changes that can be made to our packages, file based and registry based. Let’s take a look at how they are both handled in App-V 5.0. Registry In Part 3 of this series we really went behind the scenes of how the registry hangs together both from a native and virtual perspective for our App-V packages. So what happens when we make a customisation to an application that makes a registry based change? I’m going to customise Paint.NET above by hiding the floating windows Tools, Colors, History and Layers. This change is obviously retained every time I launch Paint.NET thereof as a customisation for the user. Let’s take a look at where in the registry those cha...

Now we understand the package format and client file system for App-V 5.0, let’s take a look out how the registry looks in terms of OS integration. As mentioned in Part 1 of this blog series, within the .appv package we can see a registry.dat file which contains the entire registry that was captured for the particular package. Also as discussed in Part 2 we can also see that the registry.dat sits in the cache location on the client once the package has been delivered. So what actually happens with this registry hive? Well it gets mounted and there twos views of this, native and virtual…. Native Registry Gone are the days when we have to break into the bubble to see an App-V applications registry, similar to the file system cache, we store assets in natively to windows standards. The only difference is the physical registry location is not stored directly in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE but rather HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsof...

Following on from my post  App-V 5.0 OS Integration - Part 1 - Package Format   where we talked about how a App-V 5.0 package is made up, now we can move on to look at how this package is reflected on your client operating system after the package has been delivered in terms of file system and cache. Cache When App-V 5.0 packages are delivered by default they are stored in %ProgramData%\App-V, this is the physical cache location. In here we will find folders labelled with the GUID of the packages they contain. To easily find what our package GUID is we can use the Get-AppvClientPackage command, wildcards are great to return a filtered result, and for example here I am searching for Paint.NET: We can see Paint.NET has a package GUID starting with CA43, if we drill into this folder we are faced with another GUID! This is our version GUID, as we only have one version of this package published at present there is only one folder. If we go into this folder we...

In this series of posts I am going to take you behind the scenes of how our packages integrate with our operating system in App-V 5.0. The most logical place to start is with the package itself and understanding what is output by our Sequencer. Let’s take this Paint.NET package and try to understand how it is made up. report.xml This file is carried over from our 4.6 SP1 days and contains diagnostic and advisory items around our sequenced package such as any warnings or errors encountered during sequencing or any files that have been excluded. <PackageName>_UserConfiguration.xml This file is for user specific changes that can be influenced at the time of publishing a package to a user. For example if we want to deploy a package with different shortcuts or a specific script to a certain group of users. <PackageName>_DeploymentConfiguration.xml Similar to the above however this file is for global changes that can be influenced at the time of publishing a p...

Issue: After upgrade to new version, a trust certificate import prompt comes up as older version of Acrobat had Trusted Certificates recorded over time. Analysis: The Certificates are saved in user profiles at this location: %appdata%\ Adobe\Acrobat\ <version> \Security\addressbook.acrodata If the file is copied to new version Security folder for each users then it will not prompt for import, and all the Trust Certificates will be imported to new version. Solution: Create a custom VBScript to copy addressbook.acrodata from older versions to new version for each users (e.g. upgrading from versions 9.0/10.0 to 11.0) for Win7 Add it to Execute Immediate Installation Sequence after InstallFinalize Copy_Trust_Cert.vbs Script: dim arcfolder, arc10folder, arc9folder Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set objFolder = objFSO.GetFolder("C:\Users") Set colSubfolders = objFolder.Subfolders ...

Active setup provides a solution when the aim is to deliver user based components when no advertised entry points exist in an MSI package. Most packages will contain some kind on entry point; commonly an advertised shortcut. When launching this kind of shortcut Windows Installer will check the keypath of the component the shortcut belongs to and verifies that the component is installed. If it is found to be missing Windows Install will kick off a repair. This provides a great solution for installing current user data when the package is not installed in the user context. It is also a very good reason why you should never mix machine and user data in the same feature. So what do you do if there are no shortcuts to advertise? Active Setup will solve the problem. An MSI package has been created to install an Outlook plug-in. This package installs both user and machine data. User preferences are stored as a combination of HKCU registry and a XML file written to %USERPROFILE%. As t...

The issue on many blogs and articles is around creating the 'deployment.config' and 'deployment.properties' files for an enterprise deployment.  In my case i wanted to set the security level to 'Medium', but everytime I open the Java control panel it was set to the default HIGH setting. Solution  1 Create the following directory path 'C:\Windows\sun\java\deployment' 2 Create a file called 'deployment.config' in this directory and open with Notepad. Copy the two line below #################### deployment.system.config = file\:\\C\:\\WINDOWS\\Sun\\Java\\Deployment\\deployment.properties deployment.system.config.mandatory = true #################### 3 Create a file called 'deployment.properties' in this directory and open with Notepad. Copy the four line below (# deployment.security.level.locked optional) ###################### deployment.security.level=MEDIUM deployment.browser.path=C:\Progr...

Windows Installer is an engine for performing transactional installations. When installing a product for the fist time, most often few or no files to be installed are already present on the machine. But when upgrading or patching a product, most often those files are replaced so copies must be kept if an error occurs and the installation needs to roll back. The following describes where and why Windows Installer may require so much disk space. Extracted files A bootstrap application may be required for a number of reasons. A bootstrap application may compressed setup files into the bootstrap application, or they might all be included in a self-extracting archive. Bootstrap applications may also download files from a web site either directly to a location on disk or indirectly to the Internet files cache. This location is typically under %TEMP%. If the extractor did not delete these files, you can delete these files after installation has completed. Note that some installers m...

While launching from Admin account or doing “Run as Admin” it was launching properly but when launched from the standard-user account, though it was launching but GUI was not coming properly and before launching, it throws the error that some particular Skin file is missing. I checked in installation folder and skin file was there but still while launching I was getting the error, but when launched from Admin account or using “Run as admin” it was launching properly with proper GUI and no skin file missing error. On exploring further I found that application was installed by admin account and it created some entries in HKCU, and these entries contain the path and name of skin file to be used. So when we launched the application from Standard user account then these entries were empty in HKCU for Standard user. So to solve this problem while re-packaging I used Active Setup . Active Setup provides a great solution for installing current user data when the package is not installed ...