Is there any definitive documentation on writing software installers?

Question

I\'ve read a bunch of documentation on installers and haven\'t come across anything good that explains the underlying concepts. Most of the installer software I\'ve come ac

Answer 1

This (MSDN, About Windows Installer) is the best starting place for good 'General' information about installing on windows. All of the installers that are "msi-based" will relate to these concepts.

The only 'other' installer types (in the windows world) is NSIS which is really not for enterprise installations (I don't want to start a debate on procedural vs. non-procedural installers here).

Install stuff is REALLY complex with advanced concepts like advertising, restore points, patches and transforms and the like, but when you 'get it' you can do some pretty cool things, like the work-around to get TFS 2008 using SQL 2008.

TFS 2008 does not support SQL 2008, but TFS 2008 SP1 does, so what you have to do is "patch" the TFS 2008 RTM install with the TFS 2008 SP1 install with a command like this:

msiexec /a C:\TFS\RTM\AT\vs_setup.msi /p C:\TFS\SP1Extract\TFS90sp1-KB949786.msp TARGETDIR=C:\TFS\ATIntegrated

but the result is something that you can no hand out as "TFS 2008 with SP1".