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IntroductionChange History
MAKEMSI like most products I work on is a work in progress,
it is never "perfect".
In any case my perfect is probably different from yours.
I do the best available in the time I have and then improve where and
when possible, for this reason feedback is very important as it tells me
where I may need to concentrate some effort.
Most of the MSIs I build using MAKEMSI are for
automatic installation under the system account on a
"standard controlled environment".
Feedback from other people using MAKEMSI in different ways helps
me build a better tool.
Please let me know of any bugs or issues and do not assume that someone else has reported it.
I have generally fixed all known bugs/issues.
The very fact that you are having a problem means that I probably
do not know of it!
In rare cases I do get snowed under and forget things, in this case
please remind me!
Note that I don't put every little change here but mainly the
ones that you may notice or you should be aware of.
To see what I might be up to between releases this page is
updated online at
"http://makemsi-manual.dennisbareis.com/changehistory.htm
".
If I have any fixes available between releases these will be available
at
"http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/makemsi/files/".
Note that these may be "experimental" or quick fixes so be sure to backup
files so that you can restore things if required.
- In progress (to do soonish... OK, at least I know I definately need to do it!)
- When deleting a scheduled task it is probably best to send
a "stop" request to it first (at least by default).
- English text, in sundry ".mmh" files (mainly "uisample.mmh"),
see the "Internationalization" section.
- Look into smart cabbing
.
- Check out sorting of .chm contents: And a very minor thing I
noticed at the MAKEMSI help file: the command list in the contents
seems to be alphabetical, but a number of entries starting with
'Registry' stand in between Platform and ProductFind.
On closer examination, this is not a bug as such but
the ordering of entries in the documentation
(which I should improve).
- Any "flashing" tooltips in the documentation (MAKEMSI and generated)
is an IE 7 bug, but is there something I can do about it?
- At the moment use of anything but "|1" for the CheckBox
values ("DialogEntry") will cause unchecked
items to become checked when the back button is pressed to
return to the dialog.
- Next Release
You tell me, feedback please!
Have you ever looked at a product and said
"Wouldn't it be nice if ...", well get on your backside
and send an email, make it so!
- Note that documentation improvements occur almost every release.
- Your idea here :-).
Most of the code & documentation changes are either made based on my own personal experience
or from user forum questions/problems, I get little practical feedback.
- 11.323 (19 November 2011)
- Improved the "RegistryImport" command so to fix
the existing line hook (which effectively couldn't be used) and
added a hook to manipulate a "STRING" values information to handle
"regasm" output etc.
- 11.249 (6 September 2011)
- Have modified "MM.CMD" so that it works
around the WINDOWS 7 (Vista also?) explorer command line bugs.
The "/root" parameter only used where Windows major version is "5".
- Made some non-functional changes to the "dialog" commands so
that the VBS marks the reason for its creation better
(if validating or transforming).
- Includes newer PPWIZARD (version 11.140).
- 11.087 (28 March 2011)
- The "DEFAULT_FILE_LANG_WHEN_GETLANGUAGE_FAILS" value was not being
applied since the "10.341" release.
- Made minor changes and added error checking to make it much less likely
that a line continuation (user) error would go undetected when creating
scripts (VbsCa).
- 11.078 (19 March 2011)
- Christoph Vogtlaender found a bug in the handling of double quotes
by the "DATA" parameter of the "VbsCaSetup"
command (quotes were being doubled up).
- Includes newer PPWIZARD (version 11.078).
- 10.341 (7 December 2010)
- As pointed out by Christoph Vogtlaender, all files were getting
the language "1033" (the configurable default).
Have adjusted "FileLanguage()" as suggested and testing proves
it works again.
- 10.241 (29 August 2010)
- The "PopupMessage()" sample code in "TryMeDllCustomAction.MM"
was leaking handles (as reported by "grizzlyyh"),
incorporated the fix provided.
- By default MAKEMSI now generates a warning when no final
validation occurs so that it is more obvious that this is not
a desirable state of affairs.
Override "VALID_MSIVAL2_COULDNT_VALIDATE_WARNING" to disable or alter.
- 10.169 (18 June 2010)
- The "DllCa-C" command was not detecting failures
in the batch file correctly, in general this would cause other
downstream issues and be detected anyway.
- Added "DLLCA_C_MINGW_INCLUDE_DIRECTIVES" to the
"DllCa-C" command's configuration.
- Fixed minor bug in "TryMeDllCustomAction.MM",
it didn't display the "INFO" message if not compressing result.
- If no files being compiled now delete "_MAKEMSI_FileSource"
if required to avoid "ICE03" messages.
- 10.087 (28 March 2010)
- The "10.067" release broke the "Dialog" command as
the "condition" parameter now needs to be specified.
- You could not specify "" for the "Integer" parameter of the
"DialogEntry" command as documented.
- Added "<??*ProgramFiles>\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0" to
the default list of locations searched for the SDK.
- If you specified a licence file in the
version file which had the same
name as the default it would generate a pointless warning.
- 10.067 (8 March 2010)
- The code for the FilesInUse dialog tip
was dodgy, I fixed this and improved it to show the number of
running instances of a program if more than 1.
It allows you to check the command line and uses regular expressions
for matching.
- Updated "FIREWALL.MMH".
- The "CONDITION" parameter used to default to "" but is now mandatory
for the commands
"AbortIf", "DllCa",
"ExeCa",
"JsCaSetup" and "VbsCaSetup".
It is unlikely anyone would want an empty condition and covers cases
where insufficient testing has been performed.
- 10.030 (30 January 2010)
- I think my v09.360 change to the "VbsCa" command
created the problem which could cause builds to fail (inline always).
- Improved the UnzipImage
sample to log more and display better error if "iunzip.exe" not found.
- 09.360 (26 December 2009)
- New "ControlName" parameter on the "DialogEntry"
command allows you to "name" controls if you need to refer to them
elsewhere.
- By default the "VbsCa" command will now use
"FileMake" to generate the binary script so that
the "binary" will no longer change for "insignificant" changes.
This makes it much easier to detect "real differences" between msi versions.
- I have now replaced the code that made use of
"DTREG.EXE" so it is no longer installed at all.
- 09.328 (24 November 2009)
- Added the ".NET Framework Installed?" validation/sample.
- The base url of all links in the generated html report that pointed
into the online MAKEMSI manual incorrectly started with
"http://dennisbareis.com/makemsi/" (causing a 404).
- If you used "MM.CMD" without parameters and
there was only one match whose filename contained spaces then the
build wouldn't work.
- I finally got sick of the false AV hits on
"DTREG.EXE"
(which is only used by experimental "SelfRegImport" command) so its
now zipped in a password protected archive to "hide it".
If you need it then unzip to install.
- 09.316 (12 November 2009)
- The "compile" command now supports
caching of "MakeCab.EXE" output.
- A type of "DWORD" on the "Registry"
command could fail with ICE70.
- Setting "UISAMPLE_DISABLE_TYPICAL_SETUP" to "A" would cause the
build to fail syntax error.
- 09.296 (23 October 2009)
- The default method used to persist properties during uninstall
in the "Property" command was changed to use
permanent (versus unregistered) components as this allows repair
of those values.
- The compile options can now be varied per
"compile" command.
- 09.284 (8 October 2009)
- Added the "64Bit" parameter to the "RegistryRead"
command.
- Added the "RAW" parameter to the "Registry"
command.
- Rather than warn you if you forget to supply "VALUE" on
the "MsiFormatted" parameter for
"MultiString" types, the code now automatically applies it.
- An "ICE70" during validation and a
1406 error during install
would be generated if you supplied a string starting
with "#" (which has special meaning to Windows Installer)
to the "Registry" command.
- As this is my new laptop running 64 bit Vista Ultimate, if
anything was to go wrong this is the release it will occur in but
I'm pretty confident. Let me know if that was wrong :-)
- 09.198 (17 July 2009)
- The "FileFind" command could fail with a
2228 error on the "Signature" table
when searching for a directory, I think this is because of
a change to Windows Installer (it now requires it).
- 09.155 (2 June 2009)
- Improved my solution to the "HTMLMSITABLE_MSIDIFF_NAME" issue as
the one in "09.153" required MSIDIFF to be installed
(or some reconfiguration) by default.
- 09.153 (2 June 2009)
- The "DllCa-C" command would fail if a long
(non 8.3) binary key was chosen
(for example "SimpleSlashRemoval.dll", "Simple.dll" worked).
- Updated the "VbsCa" &
"VbsCaSetup" commands to support type 38
custom actions (simple inline).
- Updated the "JsCa" &
"JsCaSetup" commands to support type 37
custom actions (simple inline).
- Removed the hardcoded path from the DEFAULT value for
"HTMLMSITABLE_MSIDIFF_NAME"
(minor fix for people not installing to "c:").
- Fixed the "VbscriptBasedService.MM" sample.
- Adjusted the attribute ("type" parameter etc)
handling of all custom actions.
- Minor enhancement to the "Schedule" command.
- 09.045 (14 February 2009)
- The "CONDITION_PER_USER" definition was faulty.
- 08.362 (27 December 2008)
- Fixed the "Integer" parameter of the "DialogEntry"
command to work with numbers greater than 32,767.
- 08.345 (10 December 2008)
- 08.320 (15 November 2008)
- 08.312 (7 November 2008)
- 08.298 (24 October 2008)
- 08.257 (13 September 2008)
- 08.241 (28 August 2008)
- The "Directory" command's "conditional" directory
creation support would create the code even if the key's case was
different (keys are case sensitive).
As this probably only occured in the case of a user error this
change probably won't change the outcome but I have now documented
error "2756".
- Moved the definition of validation entries for
"MAKEMSI_TABLENAME_CABS" table to the "compile" processing.
- "VbsScriptTestingStub()" could logs some irrelevant "err" details.
- 08.232 (19 August 2008)
- The "MsiValFilter" "regular expression" tests
could cause validation filtering to fail on some workstations
(on any particular machine it would either consistently fail or work).
MAKEMSI should now also detect and warn about any filter failure.
Also added some more debugging features to the validation process.
- Many MAKEMSI commands make use of the "GetSeqNumber()"
routine which would display an error if the available space was exactly
equal to the requested number of sequence numbers.
- The "CustomAction" column "ExtendedType" is now created by default
allowing the new "PatchUninstall" custom action attribute to be used.
If you are operating on existing msi files you may need to
set the "TABLES_DEFINE.CustomAction.ExtendedType" macro to "N" if it
doesn't already contain the column.
- Minor change to "HookInto.MMH" to fix the bug (#ifdef "macro")
reported by Christoph Mockenhaupt (thanks).
Found similar issue in "MacroCfg.MMH".
- Christoph Mockenhaupt improved his "FireWall.MMH" code.
- 08.209 (27 July 2008)
- Updated "uisample.msi" from the latest Windows Installer 4.5 SDK
(previous template was from the 4.5 beta).
- Thanks to Christoph Mockenhaupt for the "FireWall.MMH" code
which adds to the MS Windows FireWall Exception list.
- Thanks to Lucas Marcel for pointing out the compare bug in
the "file version compare code".
- New "INSTALLER_SDK_DIR" configuration.
- Minor change to the logging of the "ProductValidation"
command (product names on progress dialog).
- 08.188 (6 July 2008)
- 08.177 (25 June 2008)
- The "CaDeleteFile()" code
would most likely fail unless you had defined "oFS" globally.
- It is now possible to configure the
"WrapInstall" command to wait for a period of
time for an async uninstall to complete
(for example an NSIS "uninstall.exe").
- New optional "CaSleep()" routine.
- The "UpgradeTable"
macro can now be told the "@validate" information for the rows
being added.
- 08.148 (27 May 2008)
- Some tools create an "ActionText" table which only allows
for short descriptions
("L64" for the "Description" column in my testcase).
The "ProductValidation" command would fail in
this situation, the text is now configurable with the default
probably short enough for all cases.
- The "TableDelete" command can now delete
tables that haven't been predefined.
- 08.123 (2 May 2008)
- A new "AccessApply" command.
- Minor change to the "Access" command.
- The second "EntryCheck" in the VBS created with the
"VbsCa" command should have been "ExitCheck".
- 08.096 (5 April 2008)
- 08.066 (6 March 2008)
- Fixed the "[Date] [Time]" string that the
"WrapInstall" command places into the
"MakeMsiWrapInstall" registry.
- 08.023 (23 January 2008)
| Older Entries Than Those Above |
If you need to see older entries then please have a look at
my older change history page.
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