In some rare cases a vendor setup checks for a pending restart.
During setup capture this will bring a lot of junk into a snap-shot, so the question will be, how can I clear a pending restart in order to install the vendor setup without doing a reboot.
The following registry will is the root of the problem. Renaming the key or clear out the value will solve this issue.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\PendingFileRenameOperations
Ever wondered with which version of Wise Package Studio a msi has been built?
For this reason we have setup a comprehensive list of all known Wise Package Studio builds since 6.0:
| Version | Official Name | Remarks |
| 4.62.0.54 | Wise Package Studio 4.62 | RTM |
| 5.60.0.466 | Wise Package Studio 5.6 | RTM |
| 5.60.0.467 | Wise Package Studio 5.6 Hotfix 1 | RTM |
| 6.0.0.231 | Wise Package Studio 6.0 | RTM |
| 6.1.0.281 | Wise Package Studio 6.01 | RTM |
| 6.1.0.285 | Wise Package Studio 6.1 SP1 | RTM |
| 6.10.0.450 | Wise for Windows Installer 6.1 | RTM |
| 6.20.0.281 | Wise for Windows Installer 6.20 | RTM |
| 7.0.0.480 | Wise Package Studio 7.00 | RTM |
| 7.1.0.599 | Wise Package Studio 7.00 SP1 | RTM |
| 7.2.0.31 | Wise Package Studio 7.00 SP2 | RTM |
| 7.3.0.256 | Unknown | Internal Build |
| 7.3.0.270 | Unknown | Internal Build |
| 7.3.0.385 | Wise Package Studio 7.00 SP3 | RTM |
| 8.0.0.69 | Wise Package Studio 8.00 | RTM |
The Version used to compile the MSI will usually be saved in the “WiseEditorVersion” property:
Symptom
A software package which is non virtual may perform very slow.
Solution / Workaround
Even non-virtual application are being redirected through the SVS/SWV Filesystem Minidriver while at least 1 virtual layer is active on the system.
This may significantly slow down applications with many registry/file system I/O operations. (e.g bad performance at startup)
To work around this issue you can add those application to the SVS Program Ignore list which you may find at the following location:
HKLM\System\Altiris\ProgramIgnoreList (REG_MULTI_SZ)
However bear in mind that those applications will no longer see any virtualized resources.
What’s new in Java Runtime 7 – from a Software Packaging or Administrator point of view?
This can be answered quite short: Nothing as been changed, the new version is based on the previous installation technology with the same limitations as know.
Here are the most important details about Java Runtime Environment 7
1. A silent repair is still not supported (uninstall and install has to be done) see our bolg for more details.
2. The previous JRE 6 version will not be uninstalled when installing the new JRE 7 version, but version 7 will be the default runtime
3. The new features of Java 7 or read the change log that can be found in the internet
4. Use ‘java -version’ on a command prompt to display the default JRE version and build
5. At last but not least, this package is available as Direct Package Download, a service from Ontrex SPA. DPDs are fully automated software packages that can be deployed with any software deployment systems.
Several months ago I met a new challenge in shape of a device driver I’ve never seen before called…
NDIS – Network Driver Interface Specification.
I dont want to loose much time with talking about the “driver type” itself, because you can get all information from a well written wikipedia article.
Such a driver usually consists of the very typical driver files:
Inf File, Cat File & Sys File. Everything signed as you might expect of course.
My first attempt was to install the driver the “Ontrex Best Practices” way which usually means either to use the difxapp merge module or the dpinst.exe executable (custom action).
Unfortunately, none of them led to to same result as the original package had behave.
After googling around a bit I finally came to the tipping point: netcfg.exe
This executable is present on every windows at least since windows 2000 and basically helps you to automate any “Network Card” related installation tasks like
- Installing/servicing/uninstalling Network Protocols (e.g. Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)
- Installing/servicing/uninstalling Network services (e.g. QoS Packet Scheduler)
- Installing/servicing/uninstalling Network Clients (e.g. Client for Microsoft Networks)
Kindly asked the program offers me the following command line parameters:
So the last missing information in the puzzle is how do I know the component id for my driver?
Solution was simple: I had installed the original package and searched through the registry using the INF Filename and this offered me the following result:
Now I had all required information to schedule a custom action in my package to install the driver.
Because netcfg.exe is already on every windows installation I used the type “Execute Program From Destination” (MSI SDK: Custom Action Type 34)
[System64Folder]netcfg.exe -l “[#netlwf.inf]” -c s -i BNNS_NdisLwf
In our case the target operating system was a x64 OS and therefore we needed to specify the [System64Folder].
Because the action changes the system state it logicaly belongs to the “deferred” installation sequence.
Our Ontrex Best Practices series continues with a very underestimated topic.
We are talking about the ProductVersion Property today. As many of you already may know the property has to be formatted as follows:
major / minor / build 255.255.65535 (Source: http://goo.gl/Dj3l2)
Usually when we are repackaging we try to adapt the original Product Version as good as possible. But Unfortunately sometimes the vendor’s intended product version does not really fit in this schema which causes several problems like
We have now enforced some general guidelines regarding this to encounter any problems which may be caused by those strange vendor habits:
To conclude my blog article i really want to appeal to all developers out there:
Please try to adapt the windows installer product version schema. And avoid, at all costs, having only incremented the fourth field for any reasons. The fourth field should, if present, be used as build number only.
Therefore my recommendation for a versioning schema is as follows:
Major Release(255) . Feature Enhancements (255) . Bugfixes / Patches (65535) . Build Number (Unrelevant and ignored by Windows Installer anyway)
And, of course, do not use any kind of date for the versioning schema! 
The Ontrex SPA Team is proud to announce that our future Blogs will be authored in English as the growing amount of visitors are from international destinations.
This is our first step to provide our technical know how to a wider audience.
We also would like to introduce our offical Ontrex SPA Twitter Account:
Feel free to follow us. we are looking forward to interesting discussions about packaging, software virtualization and other related subjects in the twittersphere.
Yours Sincerely,
Ontrex SPA Team
Neulich bei einem Regsvr32.exe /silent Aufruf einer DLL Datei wurde folgende Fehlermeldung (obwohl der Silent-Paramenter verwendet wurde) ausgegeben:
The module xyz.dll failed to load.
Make sure the binary is stored at the specified path or debug it to check for problems with the binary or dependent .DLL files.
The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line systrace.exe tool for more detail.
Eigentlich dürfte dieses Fenster nicht erscheinen, da der /silent parameter verwendet wurde.
Man sollte sich auch nicht durch die side-by-side configuration in die Irre führen lassen und einfach den guten alten Dependency Walker verwenden.
Der Depency Walker zeigt die fehlenden Komponenten an, welche vor der Registration auf dem Rechner vorhanden sein müssen.
Es geht auch Stück für Stück mit dem Event-Log, der in einem Error Eintrag die benötigte DLL anzeigt.
Kurz gesagt, neue Meldung, altes Problem
During packaging a very common software we ran against the problem that SetupCapture did not capture all files in the installation.
After some investigation we found out that WPS exludes *.swp and other file extensions per default. This however may lead to incomplete snapshot results.
We therefore recommend to remove any file extensions entry from your SetupCapture Configuration which apply to ‘all directories’ :
However if you dont want to exclude those entries permanently you may include them on a per snapshot basis on the “SetupCapture Exclusions” screen.
