Collection of Useful Posts

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...

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 ...