MSI Factory - 64-bit / LUA

[arthurb]

Hi. I am a long time user of Setup Factory. I am now in need of building installs for 64-bit versions of our software and find Setup Factory lacking in that area. I am evaluating MSI Factory in the hope that it will meet our needs. I have some questions that I would like to get your feedback on.

1. It seems that the LUA code runs as a 32-bit application. For example, if I check for the existence of a registry key, it is looking in the WOW6432 section of the registry. Is this true? If so, then the whole bootstrapper and dependency checking will also not work for 64-bit setups. Correct?

2. One thing that I currently do with Setup Factory 7 is to create a small subset of my original setup and use that when doing minor release updates (in conjunction with True Update). This small setup just replaces files and does not have an uninstall. The uninstall from the original complete setup uninstalls the files installed during the update. Is it possible to create an MSI file that just replaces existing files and does not include an uninstall or break the original install?

Thanks for your feedback.

Regards,

Arthur

[jassing]

1) if you use a boot strapper in MSIF, it's still a 32 bit app. If your concern is non redirected registry reads/writes -- there's code available to do this.

2) SUF can install w/o producing an uninstall. MSI's will always have their own uninstall...

[arthurb]

Thank you. I went back to using Setup Factory instead of MSI Factory. For me, it was easier because I am more familiar with SUF. I used your Registry64 code (thank you) and have one setup that works on either 32-bit or 64-bit systems. This seems not possible with MSIs. There, you are required to have one MSI for x86 and another for x64.

Regards,

Arthur

[jassing]

Glad the code worked well for you.

Having used other MSI builders, MSIF is (IMHO) the best; but I steer clients away from MSI's (in general) unless they need MS Certification; the "technology" is flawed in many ways and seems to create more issues than it solves...