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InstallShield 12
InstallShield includes the following new features.
InstallShield enables you to specify that your installation requires Windows Vista. It also lets you build Windows Vista–related conditions for features and components.
To provide the best possible installation experience for end users, ensure that your installation follows the best practices outlined in the Windows Vista Quality Program. InstallShield now includes a validation suite that helps you verify that your installation meets the installation requirements of the Windows Vista Quality Program for Basic MSI and InstallScript MSI projects. If you want to be able to use the Windows Vista Logo artwork, your application's installation must meet the program's requirements.
In addition, InstallShield now lets you customize the list of internal consistency evaluators (ICEs) that should be used for installation package validation and merge module validation. This is helpful if you do not want to pursue logo certification but you still want to ensure that your installation or merge module meets specific best practices that are verified during validation. To configure validation settings: on the Tools menu, click Options and select the Validation tab.
To learn more, see the following:
InstallShield includes support for the User Account Control functionality that Microsoft added for Windows Vista. Use the new Require Administrative Privileges setting in the General Information view to specify at a project-wide basis whether administrative privileges are required for an installation. Also, use the Required Execution Level setting in the Releases view to specify the minimum level required by your installation's Setup.exe file for running the installation (the setup launcher, any setup prerequisites, and the .msi file) on Windows Vista platforms.
For details, see:
Restarting the system after an installation is inconvenient for end users. One of the Windows Vista Quality Program requirements is that all installations must contain an option that enables end users to automatically close applications and attempt to restart them after the installation is complete.
To support this quality guideline, an MsiRMFilesInUse dialog is available in all Basic MSI projects. The installation displays this dialog if one or more files that needs to be updated are currently in use during the installation. To learn more, see Minimizing Reboots on Windows Vista Systems.
If you specify digital signature information for your installation, InstallShield automatically adds the necessary information to the MsiDigitalCertificate and MsiPatchCertificate tables. The MsiPatchCertificate table contains the information that is needed to enable User Account Control (UAC) patching. This enables you to create patches that can be installed by non-administrators.
In addition, the Build Installation page in the Project Assistant now offers the ability to specify digital signature information for your installation.
For more information, see:
The intended behavior of each custom action must be documented for the Windows Vista Quality Program. This is especially helpful if system administrators deploy your product to enterprise environments; they sometimes need to know what the custom actions do. InstallShield now has a new Help File Path setting in the Custom Actions view to help you meet this requirement. Use this setting to specify the path of a document that describes the behavior of a custom action that you create for your project. For details, see:
This documentation now describes each of the built-in InstallShield custom actions that are added automatically to InstallShield projects to support different functionality. See InstallShield Custom Action Reference.
Many enhancements have been made to the Setup Prerequisite Editor:
For more details, see:
Redistributing setup prerequisites is now more flexible than ever. You can specify different methods for supplying each individual setup prerequisite in your installation. This enables you to store some of the setup prerequisite files on the source media; compress some of the setup prerequisite files into Setup.exe, to be extracted at run time; and download some of the setup prerequisite files. In addition, you can now assign release flags to setup prerequisites. Then you can include and exclude any combinations of setup prerequisites when you build different releases.
To learn more, see:
InstallShield provides support for the option to easily log installations run with Windows Installer 4.0 on a project-wide basis without having to use the command line or configure log parameters through the registry. To enable logging, specify Yes in the new Create MSI Logs setting in the General Information view. To override the default logging parameters, edit the MsiLogging property in the Property Manager view. If the installation is run on a target system that has Windows Installer 4.0, the installer creates a log file and populates the MsiLogFileLocation property with its path. In addition, a Show the Windows Installer log check box is added to the SetupCompleteSuccess, SetupCompleteError, and SetupInterrupted dialogs.
For more information, see Specifying Whether Windows Installer Installations Should Be Logged.
InstallShield includes support for the new Windows Installer 4.0 attribute called msidbComponentAttributesDisableRegistryReflection in the Component table. To easily configure this attribute, set the Disable Registry Reflection setting for a selected component in the Components view. Registry reflection keeps the 32-bit registry view and the 64-bit registry view in sync on a target machine. Only 64-bit systems with Windows Installer 4.0 support this setting. Other systems ignore it. For more specific information, see Enabling and Disabling Registry Reflection.
If you are preparing an installation for a multilingual application and Windows Installer 4.0 will be running the installation, you can now use InstallShield to create shortcuts that include support for the Windows multilingual user interface (MUI). Four new settings are available in the Shortcuts view for a selected shortcut:
These new settings correspond with the four new columns in the Shortcut table for Windows Installer 4.0. To learn more, see Shortcut Properties.
InstallShield now enables you to specifically target installations for Pocket PC Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows CE .NET 5.0 mobile devices. For more information about installations for mobile devices, see Windows Mobile Wizard/Smart Device Setup Wizard.
Several new redistributables are available for mobile device installations: .NET Compact Framework 2.0, SQL Mobile 2005, SQL Client 2.0, and SQL Mobile 2005 Replication. In addition, installations for Smartphone 2002 and 2003 now support redistributables.
All mobile device platforms now support digital signing. Previously, digital signing was available for Smartphone 2002 and 2003 only.
Installations created for the Windows Installer service dramatically differ from traditional installations, making it impossible to reuse legacy installations without a repackaging tool. Repackager assists you by capturing the data placed on your system during installation and converting it into a Windows Installer package, which you can then customize and distribute according to your organization's needs. To learn more, see the help library that is included with this tool.
InstallShield Premier Edition now includes a five-pack of licenses for InstallShield Collaboration for Visual Studio. You can use these licenses to install InstallShield Collaboration on development systems that do not have InstallShield but do have Visual Studio .NET 2002, Visual Studio .NET 2003, or Visual Studio 2005.
The InstallScript MSI architecture has had a number of issues with security (COM/DCOM) and other areas that can cause some installations to fail for various reasons. The architecture has been improved dramatically for InstallShield 12 to resolve these issues and to make InstallScript MSI a more reliable project type. The improvements also help increase the reliability of Basic MSI projects that include InstallScript custom actions.
To learn more, see the following:
InstallShield includes support for the latest version of Driver Install Frameworks for Applications (DIFx). This new version, which includes the latest binary files from Microsoft, is available for any Basic MSI, InstallScript, or InstallScript MSI projects that you create in InstallShield.
Some of the command-line parameters for Setup.exe and Update.exe were added or modified:
For more information, see Setup.exe and Update.exe Command-Line Parameters.
To prevent InstallShield from extracting undesired COM data from a COM server, you can edit a new Filters.xml file that is installed with InstallShield. Editing this Filters.xml file enables you to customize the list of registry keys that will be excluded from COM extraction.
The Filters.xml file also now lists files that the Static, Dynamic, and Visual Basic dependency scanners will exclude or include. Previously, two different files—Userscan.ini and Iswiscan.ini—were used to list excluded and included files.
For more information, see:
Several areas of InstallShield have been revised so that it is now compatible with Internet Explorer 7.0. The Transform Wizard, Custom Action Wizard, the String Table Editor, the Distribute view, and the General Information view are all examples of areas that have been updated.
Online activation of the Try and Buy type of trialware that is created with InstallShield has been enhanced to allow end users to perform online activations when they are accessing the Internet through a proxy server. Therefore, you can now perform an online activation of InstallShield through an authenticating proxy server. In addition, if you have an InstallShield Activation Service account and you use InstallShield 12 to create the Try and Buy type of trialware for your product, your end users can activate your trialware through an authenticating proxy server.
The list of recently opened projects that are displayed on the Start Page now includes a column that shows the project type. In addition, the maximum number of projects that are listed has been increased from four to eight.
Several enhancements have been made to the InstallScript language. New and revised variables, functions, and constants are now available.
A system variable called DISK1SETUPEXENAME has been added.
Two system variables have new default values:
Two new InstallScript text substitutions are available:
For more information, see System Variables.
Two new script variables are available:
A new LANG_SUPPORTED predefined constant is available for use with the Is function. To learn more, see Is.
A new ISOSL_WINVISTA predefined constant is available for use with the FeatureFilterOS function and the SYSINFO structure variable. For more information, see FeatureFilterOS function and the SYSINFO.
The DoInstall function is now similar to the LaunchAppAndWait function. For more details, see DoInstall.
The predefined InstallScript events are no longer available in Basic MSI projects that have InstallScript custom actions. Therefore, if you have an InstallShield 11.5 or earlier Basic MSI project that has script code in any events, you must move that code to one or more InstallScript custom actions.
For InstallShield 12, a number of improvements were made to the InstallScript MSI architecture to resolve issues with security (COM/DCOM) and other areas that can cause some installations to fail for various reasons. The architecture was improved for InstallShield 12 to resolve these issues and to make InstallScript MSI a more reliable project type. The improvements also help increase the reliability of InstallScript projects, as well as Basic MSI projects that include InstallScript custom actions.
In addition, the merge module project type has been enhanced: it now has the same InstallScript view that is available in Basic MSI projects. This enhanced version of the merge module project type replaces the InstallScript MSI object project type, which is no longer available in InstallShield.
To learn more, see Upgrading Projects from InstallShield 11.5 or Earlier.
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