I've been playing around WiX lately, and I have found that WiXUI wizard is not flicker-free. When you click "Next" to advance to the next step in the wizard, the wizard window is actually destroyed and then a new window is created with the next step. This does not allow for clean transition between "wizard pages". I come from Inno Setup, where this is perfect, no flickering or window recreation at all.
Is it possible to achieve flicker-free wizard steps transition in WiX, and how?
Is it possible to create my own wizard GUI (in C++ or Delphi), which would WiX use instead of the WiXUI?
That's how MSI handles the NewDialog control event. If you want complete control over UI, you need an external UI handler, like Burn in WiX v3.6.
Related
How to add a custom dialog to the execute sequence of a Basic MSI project in InstallShield 2010?
I want this dialog to be shown when installer is run directly as a .EXE file or
from the command line MSIEXEC.EXE with basic ui command line argument
Is this possible to do, if so how?
Thanks in advance
Raghu.
Create your dialog in the User Interface view. Then, depending on whether you want it to be part of the wizard panels, or standalone, either:
Edit the Control Events of the Next and Back buttons to have NewDialog actions that point to your new dialog, and from it to its new surrounding pages, or
Add to the InstallUISequence a custom action that references your new dialog, and ensure that it has a Control Event action that will close it.
Chances are most dialogs will be better as part of the series of wizard panels, so I would suggest going with the first option.
I'm creating an installer using wix for my project. For the installation of the project, wix uses a GUI
based on WIXUI_Mondo. When the application is uninstalled from control panel, the user just sees a small box with a progress bar. But i want to add a window asking the user if he made a backup of the configuration file for future use. In that window i also want to add two buttons one to proceed the uninstallation and another to abort the uninstall process.
I can't find anything on google about this, so do you guys know if this is possible and how i can achieve this?
Thanks in advance
You should be able to achieve this by setting the ARPNOREMOVE property. This will disable the Remove button so users have to run the Modify button to activate uninstall.
As far as I know there is no UI during uninstalling. The only way is a custom action (e.g. from DLL) with a dialog window.
I need to know how to open the form of a program I am debugging.
I loaded an existing solution into VS2010, I can see the code, but I want to see the GUI part of the project, click on buttons and see what part of the code they take me to, set breakpoints where I feel like.
I don't know how to see the GUI in VS2010, where can I do that?
Also, where would be a good resource to learn the ins and outs of VS2010?
Depending on how the UI was created, there may or may not be a way to see the UI at design time. Particularly if this is an older Windows UI application, it's likely that the windows are created entirely in code, and there is no design-time UI for you to see.
There is a dialog editor, for dialog windows that are defined in resource (*.rc) files. CTRL-SHIFT-E brings up the Resource Viewer and you can look for things under the Dialog node. It is possible that your main window is a dialog-style window, as that's one of the options you get when you create a new MFC-based application.
Otherwise, your only option to see what your UI looks like is to run the program and see. Tracking down which UI elements do which actions in your program will require finding the appropriate event handlers or message handler methods (again, depending on what UI framework, if any, is in use) and setting breakpoints.
The generic answer is:
Hit F5 to starting Debugging mode. (Or under the Debug menu choose Start Debugging)
But it depends on how your project is setup and what type of project it is if F5 will work that easily for you.
What kind of program/language are you using?
With a form, I believe you have to File-->Open-->Project/Solution
Now if its a website, you would open Website. If you tried to open a windows form under a website then you wont see the design.
Typically you would just double click your form name (form1.cs) because then your design view will pop up or hit Shift+F7 or rightclick --> view designer. Then just double click whatever tools you have on your form (like a button) and it will automatically go to the button code.
If its a website, then it would be under website1.aspx while the code sits in website1.aspx.cs
But if none of that helps, here is a good place to learn this stuff
VisualStudioWalkthroughs
We are upgrading our installers to MSI, and have noticed that you can not "right click and paste" into the text boxes. You can however ctrl+v. Is there a setting that you can switch on to enable context menus within the installer?
The MSI native UI is horribly primitive, though pretty clever considering it's expressed using a set of database tables ;)
If you need to exercise any degree of control over the UI then you would be better off writing your own front-end interview applet to build up a set of configuration parameters and using that to launch the install with a minimal UI, passing the the parameters in as a set of installer properties.
MSI subclasses the controls it displays, the WndProc for edit controls which MSI sets for edit controls may be implemented in a way that it does not pass right-click events to the original WndProc, and therefore context menu is not displayed.
There's no setting that you can enable context menu functionality.
As you might know katmouse enables scrolling over non active windows. Which would be especially great in vs 2010 because now you can take source code windows to other monitors. But of course it does not work. Is there a trick to make WPF receive the right message?
Try WizMouse, remember to set it to run with administrator privileges to make it work for admin level windows.
Yes, well, mostly.
Open the KatMouse dialog by right clicking and choosing settings. Go to the Classes tab, and drag the icon on the bottom of the dialog to an open vs2010 window. That'll add the new class to KatMouse. Now double click that new entry to bring up the settings for that class, and turn off the "Window has wheel scrolling support" checked box.
Unfortunately it seems like the class name changes for every source window, so I think you have tell KatMouse about every source window every time you launch vs. :(