I am looking for information on an installer software for Windows applications that may support some more advanced UI styles besides the usual and dated gray/squared artifacts popular on the early Windows days. At the moment we use InstallShield for the installation of our software and contacted them for information but after over a week we still haven't heard anything. Below a picture of an installer for mac with some more up to date UI which may in line with what I am looking for.
Any help will be highly appreciated.
You can give a try to Advanced Installer (paid) tool. It offers quite a few nice and modern UI styles.
Check their Surface style here
Related
Hi I've been developing little programs as hobby for the last 3 years and I was wondering if there was a possibility to use controls like in Office 2007+ (ribbon style) and in Windows 7.
I've been looking around the net but didn't found an answer that completely satisfies me. I only found commercial controls like telerik, viblend etc. But isn't there a from Microsoft native UI control pack available? What are my options besides self developing fancy ui controls?
If you use MFC (I don't), there is ribbon support: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee354408.aspx.
I believe DevExpress has ribbon controls. Not sure if they still have it but when I got my license it was for free, has been a few months. You may want to look into that.
--- Found it ---
https://www.devexpress.com/Products/Free/NetOffer/
I'm trying to create an installer for windows (and potentially mac) that can install a browser extension for chrome, firefox, and for IE, and I'm totally stuck. Primarily I live in web-development land and I don't even really know where to start. This installer might eventually also include something like a bing toolbar for a kickback to us on a per-install basis. I'm hoping for something that doesn't require us to learn how to author a windows installer, but if that is unavoidable what are some good services / apps we could use?
Any help, would be GREATLY appreciated.
Firefox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Adding_Extensions_using_the_Windows_Registry
Chrome: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/external_extensions.html#registry
The WiX toolkit and community may be a good place to start wrt IE.
I presume that you are imagining something like LastPass's installer
For Windows there is probably not much you can do to avoid using Windows Installer, therefore I recommend that you take a look at Wix, which is an open source toolset from Microsoft for generating installers that will shield you from a lot of problems.
I don't have any first hand experience with installing browser plugins but I am guessing that installing your plugins isn't all that different from installing a regular program - you need to place a bunch of files and set some registry keys and so on. What registry keys and so on should be documented by the browser developer (and you probably already know this since you have done your plugins).
Unfortunately, I cannot help you when it comes to the Mac.
I would like to know if you could share some (trusted) sources of information (books, URLs) that you consider the most relevant for learning Windows Installer. They could be for starting on this technology or for an advanced or professional level of knowledge.
Where can a future deployment engineer start and where can he/she go to keep on the right direction (step by step)?
I'm obviously biased but I think my blog and the WiX toolset are good ways to learn:
http://robmensching.com/blog
http://wix.sf.net (click on the Manual or Tutorial links on the right)
Some people like Phil Wilson's "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" but I never read it. I learned straight out of the MSI SDK.
I did 7 years of writing InstallScript installers before ever picking up MSI. While there is a huge difference between procedural script-driven imperative installs and data driven declarative installs, they both do the same fundemental thing: deploy software.
I became an MSI Expert but studying everything I could on the domain, writing LOTS of installs and by blogging for 7 years and answering over 4,400 posts on the InstallShield community forums. The only way to go in my book is to have been there and done that.
So the first step in your quest should be to understand the Windows Platform and related technologies very thoroughly. These evolve over the years but you should get a decent understanding of:
Fundamentals
Registry
FileSystem
NTFS
ACL's
DLL Types ( Win32, COM, .NET Assembly)
Win32 API
.NET Base Class Libraries
Service Control Manager Drivers ODBC
SQL IIS Active Directory ( GPO, LDAPand so on )
Global Assembly Cache
WinSxS Cache
DLL Hell
Good and Bad Installer Behavior
The second step is
Tools
Now let's start to writing installs. As Leslie ( Easter I assume ) said in another answer, pick a tool and learn how to use it to accomplish the above things. But don't stop there, as soon as you can go to the next step.
MSI
Start digging deep down into how your tool is working behind the scenes as soon as you can. Just as you can write C# in .NET and look at the IL with ILDASM, learn to use ORCA and see what is happening. Read the MSI SDK. Yes, it's rough and cryptic but I spent 3 months commuting beween DC and TX and I spent at least 16 hours a week traveling away from internet connections but nothing except the SDK to read. Read it, know it, live it... the cryptic help topics will eventually start to click and become second nature.
And finally, read my blog: DeploymentEngineering.com and every other blog you can find.
There is not a simple answer. The primary reason is that most install developers use a specific tool which in turn hides the bulk of Windows Installer behavior. While it would be nice if those developers had an in-depth knowledge of Windows Installer, that's not the case.
My suggestion would be as follows:
Focus on a specific tool. Many of the development environments offer a trial period and some are free. The on-line help for these tools plus the act of building some sample packages will be a useful process.
If practical, consider taking a training class for the tool. I know Flexera sells their basic and advanced InstallShield course manuals. They are a bit over-priced, but it does include need-to-know Windows Installer specifics. The problem you'll run into is that most documentation is specific to the tool without explaining a lot of the connectivity to Windows Installer.
You'll need the Windows Installer SDK -- in addition to the help file, there are some interesting tools and VBScript scripts. Orca is one tool that is included with the SDK and there are similar tools on the Internet (SuperOrca, InstEd, etc.). The SDK is not a great read but it is a great reference. As you come across specific questions regarding Windows Installer use the SDK help file to understand the deeper internals.
Google 'windows installer blog'. You probably don't want to hear that, but there are many great blogs available that cover many bits and pieces of Windows Installer. Make sure you pick up the Windows Installer Team blog.
No matter what path you choose, you'll find learning Windows Installer to be a hands-on process. I hope this helps!
I'm also biased, but this might be helpful. I recently revisited WiX for a real-world Windows Installer project and wrote up my solution which ultimately plugged into a continuous integration server.
The steps in the article take you through using WiX, localizing the MSI, and creating a bootstrapper for installing any prerequisites.
For learning, Tramontana's tutorial WiX helped me a lot.
A nice little blog post about how to debug custom actions is WiX and DTF: Debug a Managed Custom Action and how to generate an MSI log.
I will start new PDA project on the windows mobile and compact framework 2.0 or higher.
I need to design the new application user interface like IPhone, it should be smilar IPhone buttons, gradiend screens, colors, some thing like this. It seems i need to many images and backgrounds on the windows mobile application for achieving this.
I don't need to use default pocketpc UI elements, it's not useful for my project and me.
I need your some suggestions about the new pocketpc app user interface design.
Could you please share me your ideas or suggestions ?
Have a look at:
http://fluid.codeplex.com/
and
http://www.beemobile4.net/
This CodeProject article will be of interest for you (iPhone UI in Windows Mobile). You may also want to look into UI Framework for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 (MSDN article describing some of the features).
I feel your pain. Worse yet, I use Win32 and C/C++ for my WM apps, which none of the listed UI libraries even support.
The end result is that unless you buy UI components from someone else for this platform, then you will unfortunately have to write your own UI controls. I had to do just that myself. :/
There is more info here.
I took a look at all these options, Fluid looks nice but the complexity of the code put me off. I've gone with a very basic approach (which fits my current needs) and I've written an ImageButton control
I'll add a vote for Resco. I been working with .NET for years but don't have any mobile or C++ experience. The Resco controls are not cheap but they made it vastly easier and cut my dev time by at least 50% and probably a lot more. In the scale of things the cost is nothing compared to developer wages and missed deadlines. No affiliation - just a happy customer :)
Also check out the Resco Toolkit
I'm looking for a way to create websites with the cool stylings of Windows Vista, like what is shown in this screenshot (taken from one of Microsoft's websites):
Any suggestions? I'd prefer an integrated designer / IDE, but libraries or templates might also help.
FYI, the answers before this were in response to a very poorly worded question. The OP did not make it clear that they were after a web page. Thanks to Shog9 for picking up the slack there.
This is NOTHING to do with WPF or VS 2008. Its a WEB application!
Lots of control vendors have produced some great looking controls, check out the ASP.NET controls gallery there is some cool stuff there. Another well-known vendor is Telerik who have created some real nice ASP.NET AJAX controls.
Note, this is not to promote their tools, I personally have not used them, they are popular, and it's just to give you the heads up.
In short, the look is pretty much fancy imagery. Unless Silverlight is used, which uses a subset of WPF and requires the plugin to be installed on the users browser, and requires VS2008 to create.
In terms of the screen shot, most of that is nice imagery, the buttons are probably rendered like that because you are running Vista, however, they could also be replicated without Vista. The page you show is not a Silverlight page, so it is not a requirement.
Have a Google for "ASP.NET vista style controls" there's tons of people after the same stuff :)
It's not a matter of what software to use - use whatever you normally use to design websites. If you want to make a web page that looks like one you see online, you can very easily obtain:
The HTML markup on the page
The CSS style sheets used by the page
The images used on the page
The Javascript used on the page (although this is less likely to be useful, as in most cases it will have been compacted and obfuscated).
Also Delphi 2009 ;-).
As mentioned Visual Studio 2008 has WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) based development tools in it. Have a look in your Project templates for WPF Application along with WPF Browser Application and WPF User Control Library. All of these pertain to Vista WPF.
The "cool Vista stylings" are done using WPF, for which you'll need Visual Studio 2008. 90-day trial downloads are here. The "Express Products" (free, stripped-down versions) are here.