I am developing an Outlook plugin solution that involves the plugin itself and a windows application working in tandem.
The plugin targets multiple versions of Outlook - 2007, 2010 and 2013.
The windows app uses different libraries for x86 and 64 bit processors.
Of course there are dependencies of both the plugin and the app.
In addition to pure installation, I would like to make automatic updates possible. It could be something as simple as custom code in the windows app to check for updates in a predefined location. But I would like to know my options.
The solution I have in mind right now, and which I would like to ask the SO community to evaluate is as follows:
Separate Windows Setup Projects (producing MSI files) for each combination of application and configuration (This could be as many as 8 different msi files)
One common bootstrapper project, detecting current system configuration and installing prerequisites and selected msis.
MSIs would not have prerequisites embedded in them, only the uber-installer/bootstrapper would have those.
Am I missing something? Is this solution viable? Are there third party alternatives to Windows Setup Projects that would make my life easier? Full featured Install Shield maybe?
In case this actually is helpful for someone, the solution I went with is the incredibly customizable installer solution: InstallMate 7 by Tarma.
You can find out more from their website, but the features that got me are:
Built in support for x86 and x64
Customizable prerequisites
Stand-alone update tool also provided by Tarma, which simplifies
automatic updates a lot.
PRICE! Forget about spending 5K on similar features elsewhere.
Related
Is it possible to install third-party application alongside my application on my own application setup?
Let's say I were to sell some of my application, and in order to run my application on client's computer I would also need to run PostgreSQL. Is it possible to install it beside my application in my setup?
I am such rookie on that subject and don't really know where to start.
(I should mention that I am particularly interested on deploying Windows applications)
All commercial software will feature ways to help you achieve this as a built-in feature. Essentially you wrap it all in a setup.exe launcher / bootstrapper / downloader and this executable will install your prerequisite components before your own install is run, if they need to be installed.
Please see these answers for some further information on deployment tools and their features:
How to create windows installer
Simple List View of Deployment Tools
What installation product to use? InstallShield, WiX, Wise, Advanced Installer, etc
The open source WiX toolkit features a component called Burn to create such setup.exe launchers / downloaders / bootstrappers. Writing WiX XML markup code is necessary to use this Burn feature. Commercial tools Installshield and Advanced Installer provide GUI to build such setup.exe files.
Situation: I've already written an ActiveX control for my IE users which works perfectly. I build the .ocx, CAB it up, sign it, and put it on the site with an EMBED tag. Users load the page, the yellow bar shows up asking if they want to install it: all they have to do is click it, and we're off.
Now I need to build support for FF, Chrome, and Safari (on Mac). From my research, NPAPI is the way to do this, and Firebreath is supposed to make it easier. But from what I have read, deployment is not so easy. Windows users would have to run "regsvr32" on a DLL (which none of my web users would actually do). I have no idea what would happen on a Mac. I believe the user has to copy it to a directory like /Library/Internet\ Plugins/, which is also a non-starter for deployment. Firefox users would download/run an .xpi. Chrome is supposed to run a .crx.
Does anyone out there have experience with this? How do you do a easy-for-users-to-run deployment of an NPAPI plugin for the other big 3 browsers?
This is a question that is raised a lot by FireBreath users, so it's probably about time I responded in more detail on a forum that is easier to find than the project google group.
First of all, to clear up the regsvr32 thing, FireBreath does indeed support "self registering" for all browsers; that means when you call regsvr32 it installs registry keys not just for IE but also for NPAPI browsers using the methods linked to by DReJ (+1 for that info, btw, thanks. Many don't know where to find it).
However, self-registering DLLs is highly discouraged in the installer world and by Microsoft. There are a lot of reasons for this. You've done a pretty good job of summarizing the other install options in your post; You can use a .cab on IE and a .XPI on firefox, but of course those don't help you on other browsers.
The method recommended by the FireBreath team (which I lead) is to use an MSI installer for all browsers. Personally, I dislike having things work differently on different browsers for an install, so I use javascript to detect the presence (or absence) of the plugin and then prompt the user to download and run the MSI installer.
FireBreath has "built-in" support for building MSI installers with WiX. If you install WiX 3.0 or later on your machine and re-run the prep script it will create a _WiXInstaller project that will build a basic MSI to install your plugin for all browsers as part of the Visual Studio build process. You can modify the .wxs template that will be left in your home directory to customize it.
More info can be found on the FireBreath wiki:
http://www.firebreath.org/display/documentation/WiX+Installer+Help
http://www.firebreath.org/display/~me#iaincollins.com/Potential+Installer+Improvements
If you are really in love with using your .cab installer for IE (I've had problems with them, but some seem to have good luck with them) you can distribute the MSI file inside your CAB and have it run when the CAB is installed. The advantage to this is that when you install the MSI it installs everything for IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera (as well as other browsers which are compatible with the same plugin technologies that those browsers use).
As a quick note, the reason that an MSI is the ideal solution for installing plugins (as opposed to using something that calls DllRegisterServer like regsvr32) is that the MSI is transaction based, so when you uninstall it will always reverse what was put in; that means that you don't have to worry about supporting uninstalling 10 different old installer versions that put things in different places, etc, because the MSI system takes care of uninstalling everything cleanly when you upgrade.
Hope that helps!
For NPAPI plugin you shouldn't run "regsvr32", in Windows you need to write some stuff to the register and on Mac or Linux you need to copy the plugin to specified locations (see "Installing Plug-ins"). I think the easiest way to deploy NPAPI plugin on Windows is to create windows installer that will install both activeX and NPAPI versions of the plugin (for example, you can look how deployment is done for commercial plugins like Unity3D, Roozz or Silverlight). The same is for Mac - just create installer.
I'm not aware of any way to install a plugin from within Safari.
Also, keep in mind that while you may think of the extension-style deployment as easier for users, it's not all that uncommon for Mac users to use more than one browser. If you make them re-install your plugin in each browser they will be confused (since that's not how browser plugins are generally deployed on the Mac) and annoyed. An installer or a manual drag-and-drop installation are the standard ways of deploying plugins on the Mac.
I used Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) to build my project. Scripts are written in python. The BDD I am having doesn't support Visual Studio 2008.
Please tell me what is the latest version of BDD which supports VS2008
where I can get more info about Business Desktop Deployment?
BDD is a mini-methodology related to acceptance testing and TDD (it does stuff higher up, but this is probably what you're doing).
From your question, it looks like you've been writing BDD scenarios or unit examples in Python. Visual Studio isn't a great tool for writing Python in. If you want to carry on in Python, try Vim, or you might be able to get a Python plugin for Eclipse or IntelliJ.
If you want to use Visual Studio to program, use C# or F#. There are a couple of great BDD frameworks - SpecFlow or TickSpec - which can help you.
More information, including a list of tools, is available on the Wikipedia page on BDD.
Otherwise, please clarify your problem. It doesn't make huge sense in its current form!
Edit: Well, I learn something new every day. BDD also stands for "Business Desktop Deployment", and is a Microsoft product. Here's a page with an update suggesting you should use Microsoft Development Toolkit. Hope that points you in the right direction. I imagine the tool we've been using, click-once, does something similar.
You should probably know that few people seem to recognise BDD as meaning anything other than Behaviour Driven Development in software these days. I've heard Binary Decision Diagram as well; not often though. Good luck in your search.
There's an article here that might help you with Business Desktop Deployment (BDD) versions. It's dated March 2009 and says:
Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 Update 1 replaces all prior versions of MDT and BDD. It provides additional support for new OS versions and deployment scenarios and is the upgrade path for users of earlier versions.
The article points to the MDT 2010 download page.
Does anyone know of a good software development framework or similar that has the following properties?
Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux (such as Ubuntu and Kubuntu).
No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
Have good GUI support (this is why this question doesn't give a suitable answer, as far as I can tell).
Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Among the softer requirements are having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on (There is usually some platform specific adaptations necessary), and supporting a good language such as Python or C++, though it is usually fun to learn a new one (i.e. not perl).
I think possible candidates are Qt 4.5 or above (but IFAIK Qt software will not run on Vista without any installation(?)), some wxWidgets or maybe wxPython solution, perhaps gtkmm. The examples I have found have failed on one or another of the requirements. This does not mean that no such examples exist, it just means that I have not found any. So I was wondering if anyone out there know of any existing solutions to this?
Some clarifications;
By "framework" I mean something like Qt or gtkmm or python with a widget package.
This is about being able to run the finished product on multiple platforms, from a stick, without installation, it is not about having a portable development environment.
It is not a boot stick.
It is ok to have to build the software specifically for the different targets, if necessary.
The use case I am seeing is that you have some software that you rely on (such as project planning, administration of information, analysis tools or similar) that:
does not rely on having an internet connection being available.
is run on different host machines where it is not really ok to install anything.
is moved by a user via a physical medium (such as a USB stick).
is run on different operating systems, such as Windows, Vista, Ubuntu, OSX.
works on the same data on these different hosts (the data can be stored on the host or on the stick).
is not really restricted in how big the bundled framework is (unless it is several gigabytes, which is not really realistic).
It is also ok to have parallel installations on the stick as long as the software behaves the same and can work on the same data when run on the different targets.
A different view on the use case would be that I have five newly installed machines with Vista, XP, OSX, Ubuntu and Kubuntu respectively in front of me. I would like to, without having to install anything new on the machines, be able to run the same software from a single USB stick (meeting the above GUI requirements and so on) on each of these five machines (though, if necessary from different bundles on the stick).
Is this possible?
Edit:
I have experimented a little with a Qt app that uses some widgets and a sqlite database. It was easy to get it to work on an ubuntu dist and on osx. For windows xp and vista I had to copy QtCored4.dll, QtGuid4.dll, QtSqld4.dll and mingwm10.dll to distribution directory (this was debug code) and I copied the qsqlited4.dll to a folder named "sqldrivers" in the distribution directory.
You mention wxWidgets but dismiss it as failing at least one of the requirements.
I don't know what your requirements are and in what way wxWidgets wouldn't work for you, but IMO it does fulfill them:
Cross platform: it should be runnable on XP, Vista, OSX and common versions of Linux.
It does run on those platforms, but "common versions of Linux" isn't good enough, as you can never be sure that the necessary GUI libraries for wxGTK (which should not be linked to statically) will be installed. This is however a problem for other solutions as well, unless you plan to put everything onto the stick.
No installation: Be able to run the software from a USB stick without having to copy anything to the host machine.
See the previous point, you would need to specify which libraries are needed on Linux. Also you could specify at build time not to use some of the system-provided libraries (for example for graphics, compression, regexes) but to use the wxWidgets-internal libraries instead.
Have good GUI support
Check.
Permissive licensing such as LGPL or BSD or such.
Check. You can statically link wxWidgets into your application too.
supporting a good language such as Python or C++
Supports both, and there are bindings to other languages as well.
having a set of abstractions for the most common backend functionality, such as sockets, file IO, and so on
It does have some abstractions like that, but you can link to other cross-platform libraries as well.
We use wxWidgets for FlameRobin, a graphical administration program for the Firebird SQL server. It has active ports to Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and has been compiled for at least some BSD variant and Solaris as well. It definitely runs from a stick on Windows, I haven't tried with Linux or Mac OS X, but I don't see why it shouldn't there too.
Java.
It has GUI support.
It provides your network/file/etc. abstractions.
It is cross-platform. Most platforms you can think of have a JRE available.
No need to install a JRE. Most users probably already have one, and if not, you can run the appropriate JRE right off the stick.
You can provide several startup scripts for various platforms to run the app under the appropriate JRE.
Something else to consider is HTML+Javascript. :D
You can look at Mono it cross platform, has GUI (GTK+, or Winforms 2.0) and I can execute code without installing.
This might not be crossplatform, but is maybe even better, it dont even use the platform : linux on a stick :-)
The subtitle is
Take your Java workspaces wherever you go on a USB key
Here with java and eclipse, but nothing stops you there of course.
http://knol.google.com/k/inderjeet-singh/installing-a-ubuntu-hardy-heron-java/1j9pj7d01g86i/2#
Well, it depends on what you mean by 'package'. Kylix came close to being such a thing. It was QT based, and it allowed you to write once and compile for Windows + Linux. However, it was not an open source solution.
I asked a similar question in this link
http://www.24hsoftware.com/DevelopersForum/CrossPlatform-C-Library.html
and the best asnswer seems to be QT.
I have started using QT, but it is not as easy as I expected mainly due to deployment problems due to the DLL hell, Winsxs hell and manifest hell.
Tclkit is a single-file, self-contained Tcl/Tk system. The mac version I have is about 3.8 megs. You can get a version for just about any modern OS. I carry around a thumb drive that has mac, windows and linux binaries so I can run my scripts on any platform. No install is required, just copy one file wherever you want.
The most recent versions of tcklit use native, themed widgets (though, on *nix there really isn't a single "native" set of widgets...)
I'm sketching an application deployment process for a bunch of relatively complex desktop applications. We have both native and Java apps, so the deployment must be able to check for existence of the JRE and install it if needed. Some of the apps depend on special hardware, so the deployment must also be able to launch the necessary driver installers. Some of the apps are multiplatform, and preferably the same mechanism should be able to create Windows, Linux and Mac OS X installers. That is:
The installer must be able to install, in addition to the application itself:
Java Runtime Environment.
Drivers (hardware) - that is, launch other installers.
The installer builder must be operable from the command line so that it can be integrated with an automatic build mechanism that generates installer packages for each platform as nightly builds.
In addition, I need to create "update from the web" mechanisms for the applications. It could be included in the installer, or it could also be a separate custom mechanism built into the application.
Now, this is getting a bit complex, and I suspect that there might be no single installer that could do this all. Therefore I'm thinking between two fundamentally different approaches:
Platform-specific mechanisms: NSIS would create .exe or .msi for Windows, XXX would create .deb for Ubuntu, and YYY would create .dmg for OS X.
Cross-platform installer that would handle all the requirements above: ZZZ?
Any recommendations? Some options that I've looked include:
NSIS - Excellent, but Windows only.
IzPack - Good, but requires JVM to run.
Is there an universal tool for this, or should I just pick an appropriate tool separately for each platform? In the latter case, what would be "NSIS equivalents" for Ubuntu and Mac OS X?
I have some recommendations as follows.
Use WIX (Windows Installer XML) for creating MSI installers for Windows
Use Package Maker (part of XCode tools) on MAC OS X, preferably the command line version
Write wrapper scripts (in Python or so) to drive the over-all installer creation process.
to aggregate all the components you need to install (may be from ur version control system)
generate necessary files for Wix and Package Maker as much as possible
to run the packaging tool and generate the package
Make sure that the overall installer creation process is a simple one command operation overall (with options to create different versions of your package based on criteria like release branch etc.)
Overall, developing this workflow requires some initial effort and quite a lot of thinking. But the end result is quite worth the effort.
I haven't done this on the Linux side, but I guess would use RPM/DEB on that front in this workflow.
BitRock InstallBuilder meets all the requirements, including being multiplatform and providing an autoupdate mechanism
You should take a look at InstallJammer. It will definitely handle the cross-platform elements that you want and can even add entries to the DEB and RPM databases on the target system during installation. OS X support is still experimental, but it mostly works.