Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:100% agree (Score 1) 440

I honestly want to know why vendors don't use MSI.

Because there's no good way to make MSI's easily.

On one side, there are probably plenty of GUI apps to make MSI files. A basic one comes with Visual Studio, but you just don't have control enough over what it does. There's InstallShield too, but it's pay-for, and kinda heavyweight.

On the other side, you have WiX which attempted to be a scripting language to make MSI's, but that failed spectacularly IMHO. You have to declare in advance components, paths, files, and assign GUIDs to every single thing, it's a bother. Oh, and, all this, and you don't even have a GUI for your installer, just the "Please wait, Windows is configuring blah blah" dialog.

GUI support in MSI's seems to have been an afterthought.

And don't even get me started about trying to do it from scratch using Orca.

So, by the time I'd be done fighting with whatever restrictions the tool I'd have chosen would put in front of me, I could have whipped an NSIS installer script in 10 minutes with complete Modern UI and such.

Slashdot Top Deals

Two can Live as Cheaply as One for Half as Long. -- Howard Kandel

Working...