Question

There was a challenging situation happened when i was working with install to provide product key validation. I had to use C++ unmanaged code to validate the key. Actually we had the main validation logic written in C# and I had to create a mixed project. Problem was not stopped only with these, it continued. Since I used VC++ code, it expected atleast the VC++ runtime redistributable to be installed in the client machine. I thought of dropping the plan to migrate our install to Wix because of these kind of problems.

But I came to know that there is a nice and very cool feature that DTF is available in Wix to integrate any kind of actions in C#. I used it and could integrate the key validation in couple of hours and till now it is working fine in all client machine I implemented before 6 month.

Do you have any interesting moment or nice experience with DTF?

Answer 1

I have written several .NET CAs to support our WiX based installs:

1. Managed Wrapper around HTTPAPI.DLL – supports creating IP/Port SSL bindings and HTTP Url ACLs for use in deploying WCF services. I plan to turn this one into a Wix Extension. It was very interesting learning how to properly handle rollbacks, etc.

2. SSL Picker dialog that displays all the SSL certificates on the system and allows you to pick one.

3. SQL Server browser dialog – lets you browse your network for SQL Servers and then browse SQL Servers for Databases. Optionally uses impersonation. This is for crafting a connection string.

4. I am in the process of writing a set of CAs that will use the Microsoft.Web.Administration assembly to do native installs of web applications on IIS 7 (without requiring the IIS 6 Metabase Compatibilty feature be installed).