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C# Programming Series
C# Deploying .NET Applications II
Yashavant Kanetkar
Adding Custom Installation Dialog Boxes
Once the MSI file is built and we double click on it, the installation starts. The user is presented with five dialog boxes during installation. These dialog boxes are predefined dialog boxes that get added to our project by default. We can customize these dialogs or new dialog boxes to our project using the User Interface Editor. This editor can be opened by right clicking on the project in Solution Explorer and selecting ‘View | User Interface’.
The User Interface Editor shows a tree control containing two sections—Install and Administrative Install. The Install section contains dialog boxes that will be displayed when any end user runs the installer. Administrative installation is a feature of Microsoft Windows Installer that allows us to install a source image of an application on a network share. Users in a workgroup who have access to the network share can then install the application from the source image. The User Interface Editor allows us to specify a different set of installation dialog boxes that will be displayed when an administrator installs the application to a network share via the command line as shown below:
Msiexec.exe /a Setup1.msi
This will start the installer of our application and dialog boxes specified for the Administrative Install will be displayed.
