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InstallShield was the only game in town at first. So it was amazing from that perspective. Windows installer came along and was a lot better. The InstallScri
by RajT88 3y ago
InstallShield was the only game in town at first. So it was amazing from that perspective.
Windows installer came along and was a lot better. The InstallScript engine carried with it a lot of legacy tech-startup technical debt.
Fun fact: InstallShield became a general purpose packaging tool at some point which spit out *.msi packages (and had a bunch of extensions to Windows Installer engine via custom actions). So it was pretty awesome from that perspective.
In this day and age Windows Installer itself has a lot of legacy design cruft from the era it was designed for - the late 90's.
So you're not wrong, but based on the era InstallShield was more or less crappy depending.
- wslh 3y agoI would like to add that was incredible that MSI were the installation standard and Visual Studio, which is the core of MS development, couldn't generate them! Yes, you can generate vanilla MSIs but are almost never what you want except for trivial installations. Sorry, but I want to add one more thing: the upgrade logic of MSIs is completely wrong, you need a lot of tricks to do an upgrade.
- RajT88 3y agoUpgrades were not that bad if you had a document in one place that explained how they worked (MSFT did not have this concentration of documentation - they are not the best at knowledge management). Patches though... Fuck. I think I could still produce a document that explains everything you need to know about patching but it is a lot more complicated than regular upgrades. At the same time, my career has moved to Cloud stuff now. Is my life better? Definitely not.