Every software packaging department has its own rules when it comes to MSI - whether we talk about naming convention (package naming, product naming) or package description and comments.

Lessons I have learned from making many mistakes in my enterprise software packaging newbie (and not only) years.

The purpose of this article is to show you how redirection works and how you can add your user files in the project using Advanced Installer GUI.

Just think about how many times you needed to debug your applications.And every single time you repeat the long commands in PowerShell , you wish it was a better alternative out there. Well, we felt that pain too. So, as software development is in our blood, we developed a tool to solve forever this pain.

In our previous MSIX related blog articles, we’ve approached some of the MSIX particularities and different scenarios such as Digital Signing, MSIX Deployment via SCCM, MS-AppInstaller Web Protocol, and Context Menu.

For those new to Windows deployment/management, Windows Installer is Microsoft's solution used for the installation, removal, but also maintenance of software. Windows Installer was released for the first time when Windows 95 came in and has been developed over time since then.

In November 2015, Microsoft released the first edition of System Center Configuration Manager called SCCM (Current Branch) 1511. And since then, Microsoft decided to change its name to “SCCM YYMM (Year Month)” following the same naming convention as for Windows 10 YYMM (example Windows 10 1809).

If you are in the software packaging business, you might have heard of WIX bootstrapper. This was released by Microsoft back in 2004, and it was the first ever open source license project for them.

Sometimes you might end up in a situation when you cannot uninstall a package. We already covered how you can recache an MSI in our user guide. However, we noticed that this might not work for transforms (MSTs) and a different solution is needed.

Let’s assume that you have an application that installs files or registry in a user location. In this article we explain how you can install that information for all users by using MSI, APP-V or the new Microsoft installer technology, MSIX, a short cleanup process description, and a short comparison between them.

In the lifecycle of an application package, it comes a point when an update is required. Whether we want to fix minor bugs and vulnerabilities, or we come up with some improvements and big changes to our app, we must deliver it as an update.

In January 2020, Windows 7 end of life support comes in place. This means that users won’t receive any updates from Microsoft, and companies have to pay extra for the next three years if they want them.

Hover is a free tool built by the Advanced Installer team that allows you to run natively installed applications inside an MSIX/App-V container.

There are times when you need to install multiple applications at once, either EXEs or MSIs; we call this a suite installation. Wise Installer was one of the most popular software tool used for creating application installers. It was discontinued in November 2013 and offered a solution for such cases. In this article, we have a look at how you can achieve that in a simple and modern manner using Advanced Installer compared with the old ways of Wise Studio.

False positives virus detection is a common occurrence when installing software; learn why they happen and how you might prevent them, before deploying your application to your users.

Create a single package for all Windows platforms, the promise of MSIX, Microsoft’s vision for the future of Windows Installer. MSIX is a complete containerization solution which inherits all the great features in UWP and most importantly, it applies to all Win32, WPF, Windows Forms, and UWP applications.

Self-repair is one of the most powerful functionalities Windows Installer offers. It gives the ability to check and fix broken packages automatically, saving you valuable development time.

Debug your desktop application inside an MSIX app container using the Visual Studio extension from Advanced Installer Professional edition, or higher.

The digital transformation has changed the way users work across a new generation of devices. If in the past, traditional computers were the only gateway to the digital world for both enterprise and traditional users, the mobile revolution has changed the way people access to digital information: smartphones and tablets have become, more and more, a companion to traditional desktop apps. However, despite this transformation, there are still millions of desktop solutions on the market and the enterprise-ready devices with a mouse and a keyboard are still the most effective way to achieve full productivity.

If you're a software vendor doing multiple releases a year, you're bound to hit (and hate) this problem - false-positive detection by antivirus solutions. It's just one of the neverending problems of ISVs that's eating a chunk of our time, without any ROI.