WIX Tips

Hi.

Since I have been playing a lot with MSI installers latelly and I'd like to share two tips with those authoring Windows Installers with WIX:

• You can get a lot of information by running your installation package through msiexec:
  
  msiexec /i CustomAction.msi /lvx log.txt
  
  The command above just runs CustomAction.msi logging everything including the kitchen sink :)
  

• You can use 7Zip to open msi files (and ofcourse, extract content from it)

Happing programming ;)

Adriano 

First impressions of Windows 7

Hi,

As a computer addicted I decided to download Windows 7 Beta 1 (32 bits) and give it a try (if you are interested, just search for "Windows 7 Beta1" in your favorite search engine and I am sure you'll find your way :)

In this post I want to present my first impressions about it. Please, note that I am not an expert in this subject and also that this is just my opinion based on my perception without any pretension regarding "data" accuracy.



I need to admit that I am impressed about it. My first impression is that it is way faster than Vista when running on the same machine; at least it is pretty responsive. Bellow you can find a list of items that caught  my attention and won my respect (at least for now):

• Fast Installation: ~ 20 min for a full install.
  
  
• Few prompts during installation.
  
  
• No problems with device drivers at all (Video, audio, keyboard, etc)
  
• Some devices already have preliminary versions for Windows 7
  I guess that this is more a result of not introducing deeper changes to the driver model (Vista introduced really deep changes there).
  
  
• There are some compatible antivirus already.
  
  
• Looks really fast on a relatively old hardware
  
  
• I really liked the UI changes (even being minor changes).
   
  
• Just a few UAC prompts
• Using it for some time I have seem UAC prompts only for software installation.
  
  
• IE 8 is not as fast as I'd like it to be. (But I've already installed firefox)

 Bellow you can see a screen shot.

Well, that's it for now.


Adriano

Storing PowerShell objects into a Db4o database

Hi,

First of all, Happy New Year :)

If you use both PowerShell and Db4o you maybe interested in this post.

Best

Adriano