Working with Setup projects

One thing I don't have much experience with is the Setup project type in Visual Studio. Most of my previous experience comes from writing web applications, so there was no real need to write an installer package.

But now that I've been tasked over the past 6 months or so with writing a desktop application, I've had to learn a lot of new tricks. The Windows Installer is one of those tricks. Unfortunately, the documentation for the actual Setup project type itself is rather abysmal and mostly just links into documentation for the Windows Installer SDK.

So today I was trying to figure out how to set default values for my custom properties. Unfortunately, the interface inside Visual Studio has no means for doing this. I did some reading, and I found that the tool I want is called Orca.

Orca is part of the Windows Platform SDK. It's no small download, but it contains lots of useful tools and documentation, of which the Windows Installer SDK is a part. Orca is a handy little editor that lets you modify the tables inside a .MSI package (among other things).

To set defaults for my properties, I just compile my .MSI package as normal within Visual Studio. Then I can open it with Orca, go to the "Property" table, and create the properties I need.

One thing to note as well: the case of properties makes a difference. A property that is in all uppercase (like PROPERTYNAME) is considered a "public" property; public properties can be adjusted at install-time using command line switches, like follows:

msiexec /i Example.msi PROPERTYNAME=VALUE 

A property with at least one lower case letter (like PropertyName) is considered "private" and cannot be modified at install-time by the user.

There's also another type of property you might find useful, called "restricted public." These are just like public properties, except that their values can only be modified by a system administrator. To make a restricted public property, just define it as a public property. Then, create a new property called SecureCustomProperties (or edit it if it exists). Set the value of this property to the names of the public properties you want to restrict, separated by semicolons if there is more than one.

Anyways, thats' the basic run-down. In the future I'm going to look into ways to automate this process.