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I am looking for an installer solution like it is used for Google Chrome:
When you click Download, you don't actually download the installer, but a very small Downloader, which then downloads the Chrome Installer, and launches it afterwards.
I know Sweet Labs is developing Ignite, but it is still in closed beta.
Are there any similar solutions out there, which are ready to use?
How about Google Omaha? (Actually used by Google Chrome) It seems to be the thing.
The Omaha project provides a shared autoupdate and install system for
Windows client products at Google that works on multiple Windows
platforms, including Windows Vista. Goals include the following:
One autoupdate mechanism which allows teams to roll out updates with no dependencies on other product teams, without having to write
their own client or server logic One autoupdate server that handles
all autoupdate requests - each product team will not need to roll out
and manage their own server One desktop autoupdate client shared by
all desktop client software - there will not be separate programs
running for each installed application
A tiny meta-installer which includes the update client (and knows how to install it if necessary) and a reference to the desired
application which the update client can then download and install
One-click web install of applications once the update client is installed
Support for rich update deploy logic allowing multiple tracks for public release, beta, development and "canary" experiments
Support for restricted user environments; for example, users without administrator privileges
Providing a shared runtime for other functionality common to all Google client applications: Crash reporting
Advanced Installer can do that too. It creates a small executable that can launch an MSI package from an URL you specify, so the package downloaded by the user is very small. As a bonus, you can split the application in features, and set it to create one CAB archive for each feature, so the actual install process will download only the CAB files for the features installed, reducing the download time for users that don't install all the features.
To have the user see only a small progress bar instead of full MSI dialogs you just need to tick a checkbox from Install Parameters page.
However, you should now that this feature is available only in the commercial licenses, you need at least a Professional license. You can test it, during the trial period access to all of its features is not restricted.
I now have this quite complete list of solutions:
Google Omaha
AdvancedInstaller
Somoto BetterInstaller ( + adds recommendations from which you make money)
Ignite (not available yet)
Or possibly create your own using the WiX Toolset, NSIS or Inno Setup.
All of those are free solutions, except for AdvancedInstaller. It has a free edition too, but cannot be used to create this package type; for this you need at least a Professional edition.
Related
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Suppose I have a freshly compiled and tested 100 MB software. I want to eventually distribute it and sell it online as a product. This is a cross-platform product (done in C++).
What are the needed technical steps to achieve this? For each step, a description and an example of some software (if pertinent) would help. Also, how important is it would be helpful too.
My problem is that it is not really clear what are the stages to go through to release a software online. This list would help me a lot to know what steps I should investigate in priority.
What I am not talking about / interested in (because it is mainly the results I got while searching for this):
Website building;
Marketing & Sales;
Continuous Integration servers;
Steam, Mac Store, Windows Store;
Open Source.
Steps I identified:
Obfuscate: not sure about this one;
Licensing System: activation code system integrated in the software directly (See Digital River, SafeNet, Reprise, Flexera);
Installers: MSI for Windows (see Wix), DMG for mac;
Code Signing: ensures that your users do not get warnings (Verisign, GlobalSign...)
Free Trial Distribution: putting the installers on our own site is risky because of bandwidth and lags. Your users should be able to download a free trial quickly wherever they are. So a CDN would help (AWS CloudFront).
Auto Update System: notifiy the users, download and install new versions (Omaha);
Activation: this allows the user to activate the product online or directly from within the product;
I think that these two steps are the missing pieces in your list:
Write documentation (in your case PDF/RTF/HTML, or online tutorial)
Integrate a payment provider that will accept the payment on behalf of you
With the above two steps you should be ready to go.
There are some books that I can recommend you (they are 10 year old now, but you see shareware/try before you buy/ software is an old thing - nowadays people tend to write web apps or mobile mostly):
http://www.alibris.com/From-Program-to-Product-Turning-Your-Code-Into-a-Saleable-Product-Rocky-Smolin/book/10572213?matches=50
http://www.alibris.com/Micro-Isv-From-Vision-to-Reality-Bob-Walsh/book/9122742?matches=37
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I am trying to use Advanced Installer as an application installer and auto-updater. Most of the resources is available on Advanced Installer website only.
Have any one used it before? I would like to hear more about bugs / stability issues if there are, especially auto-update feature
Regarding the bug/stability issues, you can see from the release history the frequency on auto-updater bug fixes (six this year - four in v9.2 and one each in v9.1.1, v9.0.1 and v9.0).
What I've noticed is that occurring issues are promptly solved.
I posted earlier the following:
I have used the free version of Advanced Installer, including its auto-update feature, and I have not experienced any problems with it.
Please note that I was talking about the ability of Advanced Installer MSI scripts to automatically remove older files when upgrading to a newer version of a program. I was not talking about the ability of the application to check for an update automatically. That's probably not in the free feature-set.
I have used advanced Installer It is really good.I would recommend to use it if you are developing a msi setup file for web applications.It is even integrated
with several other tools used for developing such as wix,inno setuo etc
I have not used Advanced Installer, however, just wanted to refer InstallJammer which is a multiplatform installer http://www.installjammer.com/, which I have been using to create application installer and easy to use and configure.
I am using the Advanced Installer daily for my work . I can say that their manuals are not helpful enough, especially for people who do not have any experience with those tools
. However if you pay for support , they can help you almost immediately .
For sure there are some limits about this tools especially if you want your build to be MSI the UI will not respond as well as the exe - but i know they are trying to fix this issue .
If you learn how to use it FOR sure you are going to like it.
The nice part about advanced installer is that they collect analytics (you have to pay for this feature ) and they can show you how many downloads per day , or how many users chose option 1 rather than option 2.
Or you can send those statistics to your webserver and with POST can manipulate however you want - which is free!
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I tired my hands on bazaar(launchpad), for the reason that i can host my project at launchpad, and bazaar (my local machine) would be tightly integrated with launchpad. I have posted my question at launchpad forum, and have not got any answer. Anyways...
So i was thinking about shifting it from there to some other site. I dont know why, but couple of friends said sourceforge has not remain that good, but i still see too many project linking to sourceforge.
PS recommendation. Is there a place where you guys upload your personal projects, and also SVN I think is the most popular, but with git/bazaar, I dont know if it just a hype or distributed version controlling is really the way to go.
I'm very happy with Assembla for my personal stuff. They offer all kinds of version control and project management tools (SVN, Git, Trac, etc). It's free for public projects (though there is a storage limit for these) and they offer rather affordable private plans (which I like a lot for managing my personal stuff with tickets, wiki etc).
I have many personal projects at Google Code. It's easy to use, and lets other people find and use my code.
For minor personal projects (mostly projects I show off on my web site), I actually use Dropbox. It's got what I need for my own needs:
I can work on my code on several machines (it syncs files across machines.)
I can access my files through the web (it has a web interface.)
If I need to go back to an old version of a file, or restore a deleted file, I can do that through the web interface (it stores a revision every time the file is modified, and it's easy to see a list of versions and download them or choose to replace the current version.)
It's also got support for making part of the structure public, so that others can download the latest version of the code. You can even share the folder so that others with Dropbox can modify the files.
Check it out!
Well, there's 2 problems here. 1) What to use for SCM, and 2) Where to host your project. I'd settle on a SCM system first, then choose a host that you like which supports your provided system. As for personal preference, I like SVN, and have been hosting projects at google code lately. Google code is kind of new, and not super feature-rich, but isn't too bad as far as hosts go.
Mercurial (and Git I believe) has a built-in web interface that easily links to your repository and allows you to host the code yourself. It provides a customizable web interface for code browsing, and allows other to clone a repo from your site instead of from SFEE. Additionally, you can set up password protection to allow a certain set of users to check into each repository.
Check out this link to see how to host repositories using Apache, and this link for Mercurial info in general.
http://bzr.bz (my project) does private bzr + trac hosting
its not free but its cheap
perfect for personal projects etc.. that are not open source
I can't believe nobody as mentioned Github yet! Github offers free git hosting for open source projects, and paid hosting otherwise.
Beanstalk offers free SVN hosting, but with a Diskspace limit of 100MB and only 3 users. You can pay to have it upgraded.
Both of these are good choices (Depending on whether or not you like Git/SVN of course), and are obviously globally accessible via the internet.
It might be a late answer by now, but personally I recommend http://repositoryhosting.com/
They offer SVN/GIT/HG hosting with Trac support, WebDAV, unlimited projects/unlimited users for 6$ a month.
I've tried other providers (assembla, github and even tried to put it on my own server), but this deal beats all competitors. I was even able to put it on my own subdomain.
Their interface is a bit minimalistic, but it does the job very well.
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We are looking into solution which involves playing copyright protected video using Microsoft DRM Server and Silverlight player. the video will be played to registered users on the web using Silverlight player.
I've read all MSDN documentation on this subject and kind of get an idea how it is supposed to work.
However, I couldn't find information on pricing and installation of Microsoft Inidividuazation server. Hence, here are my questions for someone with experience in this area:
How fast is it to setup a quick "proof of concept" solution involving windows DRM and Silverlight. Can we do it on our own or need Microsoft help?
What is the pricing for such solution in operations?
thanks!!
To answer your first question: Micorsoft Silverlight has built in support for Microsofts latest DRM technology: PlayReady DRM. To set up a proof of concept solution you will need a license server and a packaging server, both of these are availible through the PlayReady Server SDK which is built upon the .NET framework. Notice: it is an SDK, not an out-of-the box server, so some developing needs to be done. To set up a proof-of-concept solution you will need the SDK, which is accessible to you after a licensing progress that can take a few weeks. For the Silverlight DRM client, all you need is the silverlight development kit, availible free online. It's hard to say how much time that needs to go into developing the license server and packaging server since it depends on how much staff that is availible to the project and the skill of your staff, but creating licenses for the silverlight client is the easiest license to create. It should not be an overwhelming project to take on. You can set up this proof-of-concept solution your self, but you will need to involve microsoft to license the server sdk.
To answer you second question: The pricing for the Server SDK is 30k $, with additional cost depending on number of processors in the license server or a small additional cost for each license that is released by the license server. So it depends on the size of your service and customer base. If you need to release a lot of licenses you will need at more powerful license server, plus release a lot of licenses.
I would also suggest looking into PlayReady service providers. These sell production-ready playready solutions to be used by other service providers that don't wish to implement a whole PlayReady solution by themselves. A list of available service providers is available from Microsoft's PlayReady homepage.
I hope this answers have been at least a little helpful, and I wish you all luck!
You can ask from Microsoft WMDRM 10.1. It is for SERVER 2003, and It's free !!!
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To run untrusted code at home I use a VMWare virtual machine. I want to find an alternate lightweight sandbox API for running untrusted applications, without the overhead of installing VMWare, or any other kind of end-user virtualization tool like that. (Edit: I don't want it to host an OS - I want it to run untrusted apps).
Ideally the sandbox would be (or could be made) transparent so the app running in the sandbox doesn't display any extra chrome or features. (Don't they do this in Parallels on the Mac)
The Windows .NET developer side of me wishes for an API so instead of booting up a special GUI, I can script scenarios for it.
It would be like how the Google Chrome web browser contains its own technology to sandbox scripts running from the Internet to protect the system. Google doesn't need to distribute VMWare with their browser and yet they achieve sandbox security for apps.
Edit:
Looking for something lightweight like Google Chrome contains with features like greatly restricted file/network/UI access, low privileges, etc. Not looking for running/hosting its own OS.
Google's Chrome is using 4 windows mechanisms to achieve this:
A restricted token
The Windows job object
The Windows desktop object
Windows Vista only: The integrity levels
Have a look at:
https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/design-documents/sandbox
They have a detailed description of what they're doing.
No, there is not.
I mean, you can use a different Windows account (with whatever permissions you consider appropriate), but then you need to be comfortable that the untrusted app can't break out of that. But you do have that same problem with VMWare (it has had bugs in the past that let you break out). Best thing to do is run in a Virtual Machine.
You may also be interested in Google's Native Client (also known as NaCl). This is a project that aims to be able to run (verifiable) x86 code inside a sandbox.
I have not implemented this..but my $.02.
You can consider implementing a Windows station. A windows station is basically a security boundary to contain desktops and processes
Only one Windows Station is permitted for Console Logon (Winsta0)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms682573(v=vs.85).aspx
You can achieve, process, Windows Object, and ACL Isolation on a per station basis.
Some API functions used in Windows Station are listed here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms687107(v=vs.85).aspx
An Overview of Sessions,Desktops and Windows Stations.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askperf/archive/2007/07/24/sessions-desktops-and-windows-stations.aspx
There is a CodeProject example here with source:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/21352/Virtual-Desktop-A-Simple-Desktop-Management-Tool
I would recommend using API Monitor to debug Win32 API Calls
http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor
hth
You can use Invincea FreeSpace or the free Sandboxie. Not sure if any of them are scriptable or not.
These are called Containment applications, i.e., sandboxes. You can read about it here: https://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1997_hr/h970211gm.htm
In a "sandboxing" question of mine I was pointed to Sandboxie.
I does not solve my problem at all but maybe it is interesting for you?
I don't know if it has an API but a quick google indicates that it is at least somehow automatable via command line.
Unfortunately, for Windows hosts your options are extremely limited. However, on Linux hosts, options such as mbox and capsicum are available which do what what you describe - i.e. lightweight, application level sandboxing.