Windows Installer is the installation and configuration service used by Windows to add and remove applications. (For more information, Wikipedia has a great overview of Windows Installer, covering products, components, setup phases, permissions, etc..) In addition to exposing a rich, native API, Windows Installer comes with msiexec.exe, a command-line tool that offers fine-grained control over the install/uninstall process. I wanted to familiarize myself with the use of the Windows Installer API from .NET, so I wrote a wrapper class to expose it to managed applications and then a simple program to exercise it. Unlike msiexec.exe which can do all kinds of things, my ManagedMsiExec supports only UI-less install and uninstall of a .MSI Windows Installer package (i.e., /quiet mode). By default, ManagedMsiExec provides simple status reporting on the command line and renders a text-based progress bar that shows how each phase is going. In its "verbose" mode, ManagedMsiExec outputs the complete set of status/progress/diagnostic messages generated by Windows Installer (i.e., /l*) so any problems can be investigated. Aside: Although I haven't tested ManagedMsiExec exhaustively, it's fundamentally just a thin wrapper around Windows Installer, so I'd expect it to work for pretty much any MSI out there.
Read more: Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day
Read more: "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.” [ManagedMsiExec sample app shows how to use the Windows Installer API from managed code]
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