HOWTO: Using Setup Wizard to Distribute VFP App on CD-ROM

ID: Q152395

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows, versions 3.0, 3.0b

WARNING: The information in this article has not been confirmed or tested by Microsoft. Some or all of the information in this article has been taken from unconfirmed customer reports. ANY USE BY YOU OF THE INFORMATION PROVIDED IN THIS ARTICLE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. Microsoft provides this information "as is" without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

SUMMARY

This article describes how a developer can distribute an application on the CD-ROM medium using the Visual FoxPro SETUP Wizard. The Visual FoxPro for Windows SETUP Wizard will create the master for this kind of distribution medium if the developer follows the general approach described below. This approach uses standard SETUP Wizard options, but requires one additional, manual step of making a single modification to the setup.inf file created by the Wizard.

Unless this modification is made, end-users installing the application from the CD-ROM will be asked to enter the CD Key. There will be no CD Key and setup will not proceed.

NOTE: In Visual FoxPro 6.0, you may choose the "Websetup" option to generate a Netsetup file without going through the following steps.

MORE INFORMATION

To build a CD-ROM version of the application to be distributed, the developer needs to specify the build to be a network build. This will put the application into a single CAB file in a single directory. The disk image of that build will be in the location specified in response to the dialog provided by the SETUP Wizard.

Within that directory there will be a file named Setup.inf. This is a text file that may be edited by any text editor that will edit a file with the extension of .txt. Examples of Microsoft editors include Window's Notepad, the Visual FoxPro program editor, or the MS-DOS "Edit" editor.

Toward the beginning of the .inf file, there will be a line saying:


   Source Media Description

Following that will be a line similar to the following:


   "1","Disk 1","ACMSET16.EX_",""

The character string "ACMSET16.EX_" may be replaced with a similar string that is not of any consequence to the purposes of building a CD-ROM distributable.

The change to the line above is to insert a period between the last two quotation marks, as follows:

"1","Disk 1","ACMSET16.EX_","."

NOTE: To write to a CD in accordance with the ISO 9660 standard, which does not allow for file names to contain the "$" character, use the following workaround:

Run the Setup Wizard. You may choose to run the resulting netsetup to test the install.

Edit the Setup.inf file located in netsetup subdirectory and Replace all of the "$" characters with "_" (underscore) characters.

Change the file names in netsetup subdirectory from "$" character to "_" underscore character.

Write the files to CD-ROM.

Step-by-Step Example

The behavior described above may be tested by the following steps:

Construct a simple project containing a single .prg file.

Build an executable from the project.

Using the SETUP Wizard, build a network distributable and save into a folder named "Disks."

In the Disk folder, locate the Setup.inf file.

Bring the .inf file into an editor and look at the Source Media Description definition, but do not change it. Save the .inf file and close the editor.

Run setup of the application by double-clicking the Setup.exe in the Disks folder. The setup program will progress to the point of asking for the CD Key. At this point, you will need to abort the setup process.

Open the .inf file in the editor and insert the period.

Run setup again. This time setup should progress normally.

The contents of the Disks folder are ready to be burned into CD-ROMs.

Additional query words:

Keywords : kbVFp kbVFp300 kbVFp300b kbVFp600 FxotherGeneral
Version : WINDOWS:3.0,3.0b
Platform : WINDOWS
Issue type : kbhowto