code name

Now I know it.

It’s Windows Installer error 1618 that I didn’t see somewhy when attempting to fix .NET bootstrapper. Either I was inattentive or it wasn’t there: “Another copy of msiexec is running”. You can’t have two Windows Installers running, at least if one of them installs .NET. Information is from this maillist post.

Why? Implementation limitations, I believe. No sane reasons for such a contract, no article mentioned this. Surely, who’s going to declare own “features” of that kind – just a gentle hints that “you should better use bootstrapper”. Another reason to long for a systems where setup is just a copy.

So go pack a MSI, then make a MSBuild bootstrapper.

Oh wait, do I have to have 2 files in my installation? And my customers can’t download one file?

Yes. Or go for WinZip Self-Extractor, or WinRar, or whatever else.

What about build scripts? For WinRar, here’s a nice sample. For WinZip sfx, there’s also a command-line interface. Do a

wzipse32 %ARC_NAME% -setup -auto -runasuser -le -i ../icon.ico -wait msiexec -c ".\setup.exe"

WinZip will do the thing, though displaying some dialogs we don’t need at all.

Oh, WinRar won’t work, because it erases temporary files upon setup.exe completion. And we need to wait for msiexec, because setup.exe exits earlier. What a pity.