Over seventy people showed up for the third .Net User Group meeting of the year, the third in the new Microsoft Offices.  There were snacks and drinks for all who attended and we got started after a few short announcements.

Doug Ware, user group leader extraordinaire, was the sole presenter of the evening as circumstances beyond anyone’s control prevented the main speaker for the evening from coming to discuss cryptography.  But Doug was prepared with a free-ranging discussion of using Visual Studio’s Setup projects to create application installers.  Beginning with a quick thirty minute overview and ending with questions from the group on conditional installation behaviors and Windows Management Instrumentation scripting with VBScript and Javascript, Doug managed to fill the entire evening with MSI installer education.  Doug has lots of experience dealing with setup applications and he shared some of his hard earned wisdom.  For example, Doug recommends that you don’t use a bootstrap setup (creates an .exe AND a .msi installer) as you are highly unlikely to find a machine WITH the .Net framework (required by any Visual Studio setup application) but WITHOUT the Windows Installer.  Doug recommends you look into Orca, the MSI editor, so that you can change some behaviors of the MSI that Visual Studio doesn’t expose to you.  Another of Doug’s tips is to pay close attention to the Launch Conditions dialog (because this badly named dialog actually includes 2 dialogs which can be used to help control conditional installer behavior).  One final note – to get at some of the global variables defined within an MSI through script, check the Session.Property(“CustomActionData”) value.  For example, to get the target install directory, you’d check Session.Property(“TARGETDIR”).

Since the main speaker for the evening was unable to show up, everyone went home after Doug finished his presentation and handed out a few prizes.

— Matt Ranlett