[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
You can author a full graphical user interface from within the Microsoft® Windows® installer. To use the interface you must populate the appropriate tables. For each dialog box that you want to use, you must enter its properties in the Dialog table. Similarly, the BillBoard table is for the billboards you can display. You can fill dialog boxes and billboards with controls by populating the Control table and BBControl table, respectively. You may need to present a different set of controls based on various conditions. There may be a control that should be presented if the operating system is Microsoft® Windows NT® but not if it is Microsoft® Windows® 95. You can set whether a control is presented based on a conditional expression with the ControlCondition table.
There are many events that controls on a dialog box can both broadcast and respond to. The logic of what happens is defined within the ControlEvent table and the EventMapping table. The EventMapping table indicates the controls that should respond to events while the ControlEvent table describes the events that are broadcast by a control. For more information about control events see ControlEvent overview.
Some controls have more information associated with them. You can use check boxes in your user interface by filling the CheckBox table with the appropriate values. Use a check box to allow the user to set a property to some value. The records in the check box table are linked to the control table by the property that the control sets. A similar method of setting properties can also be used with other controls such as combo boxes, list boxes, radio buttons, and list views. The information for these controls is contained in the ComboBox table, the ListBox table, the RadioButton table, and the ListView table, respectively.
There are several tables relating to the text you might need to use during an installation. You can make your dialog box present information to the user or write it to a log in response to installation actions by populating the ActionText table. The UIText table contains the text that is presented to the user. You can define a set of styles for text formatting by populating the TextStyle table. If this table is populated, you can refer to the styles to format strings in other tables.