Support unattended setup

Benefits

• Minimizes user support issues and hastens resolutions by using administrator's chosen solution.
• Reduces software distribution costs
• Better allows mass deployments

Description

One of the most common setup tasks administrators typically perform is an unattended setup of an application. In an unattended setup scenario and administrator wants to be able to start an application installation and have it run to completion with having to be physically present at the machine to answer questions. You should strive to make your application deployable in this fashion.

There are a number of ways you can accomplish this. If you’re using the Microsoft^® Windows^® Installer (MSI), you could provide a tool to allow the administrator to create a Windows Installer transform. MSI transforms modify the .msi package file at install time, and can therefore dynamically affect installation behavior. If you’re unable to provide a tool to create an MSI transform, then at the very minimum you should expose as many of your public properties as possible, and document them so that administrators can supply command line options via a script for typical setup options.

To support unattended setup, we recommend that you support as many as possible of the following:

• Support a minimal UI setting. You should provide a way for an administrator to install your product with a minimal user interface, requiring no interaction.

• Don’t use UI in your custom actions. While it is often temptation to extend MSI using custom action driven UI, It’s important that you resist the temptation. A custom action should have no user interface elements.

• Document your install parameters. It’s important that you document your install parameters so that they can be set at the command line. The Windows Installer allows you to expose public properties that can be set via command line options or your customization tool.

• Create a customization tool. Customization tools allow administrators to set settings for deployment and to set installation defaults. Your tool should generate a Transform if possible – The Office Configuration Wizard is a good example of an administrator oriented customization tool.

See Also

Command Line Options, Organizing Applications into Components, Public Properties