MAKEMSI quickly and reliably creates MSI files in a non-programmatic way\Tips and TricksToolsMSI (Windows Installer) Platform SDKMSIVAL2.EXE

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MSIVAL2.EXE

This is a free tool from Microsoft (comes with the "MSI Platform SDK"). The product is not installed with the SDK, you should be able to locate "msival2.msi" (probably in the "bin" directory) and double click it to begin the install.

A number of complete SDK collections appear to be available online allowing you to bypass the download and install of the SDK if you don't need it for other reasons (click here for the "bin" directory which contains "MsiVal2.EXE").

This tool allows you run the same validations that "ORCA" does but from the command line.

It is highly recommended that this tool be run over any MSI that you generate. MAKEMSI does not try to do complete validation and assumes you will validate the MSI after generation.

The FINDMULT.VBS can be very useful as it can be used to filter you results to remove warnings or even erronious error messages.

If you are using Windows 2003 then you should be aware of the "Failed to create MSI Engine" bug.

Hangs

Sometimes this program just hangs (its possible that one of the ICE's is not handling errors correctly and stuck in an infinite loop), these hangs tend to occur once and then go away.

I have reported a bug in the "Message() method of the session object" which can hang on long messages. This sort of error will reoocur every validation until the reason is resolved, this has only occurred once to me and once I knew what the problem was easy to resolve.

Please email me any feedback, additional information or corrections. See this page online (look for updates) MAKEMSI© is (C)opyright Dennis Bareis 2003-2008 (All rights reserved). Monday July 21 2008 at 7:39pm Visit MAKEMSI's Home Page