I would like to know where I could find good resources/documentation on configuring a new Windows10 installation using Powershell scripts. I know bash but I'm completely new to Powershell.
When I search google, all I can find about automatically configuring Windows relates to Windows Deployment Services. But I don't have and don't want a Windows Server and simply running a few scripts after each installation is sufficient for me.
I found a few scripts that solve some of the things I want to do:
https://github.com/FlatlanderWoman/winCleaner
https://github.com/hahndorf/Set-Privacy
But for everything else, when I look into the TechNet Library I find it very hard to find anything useful. And when I do find something, it looks outdated:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh852115.aspx
The problem is: I known the GUI-way of configuring everything I want, but I don't know how to find the corresponding commandlets to do the same with Powershell.
Is there some kind of event listener I could use to find the Cmdlets? Or does anyone have some resources/documentation to recommend? Is the TechNet Library really the established way to find these commands?
Thank you.
Unfortunately PowerShell was only really implemented in Windows 7 (yes I know it was available for XP but not preinstalled) and even then it was kind of like an addon rather than part of the core OS. Windows 8 and 10 have further improved functionality but still for the most part do not use it for their own settings and functions as most home users would have no use for it.
However there is nearly always a way to do whatever you need to, I have a script that configures servers from scratch, renaming the server, installing requisite software and features, copying files, configuring VSS, right down to putting the Computer icon on the desktop. You just have to make a list of everything you want to do, then Google each one.
For example: https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=powershell+put+computer+on+desktop - at time of writing the first result is a TechNet script pointing at a registry key. Tidy as necessary, whack into your build script and move on to the next item.
As of yet there's nothing I've found I've been unable to do with PowerShell, but the vast majority of it has not been directly with cmdlets. There's a lot of registry tweaking and command line stuff like msiexec or schtasks, some COM objects and an awkward Type I had to create and use to set the DNS suffix.
Overall I think it's still easier to do all this in PowerShell than any other scripting language and it's more flexible than premade tools, not because it has so much functionality built-in but because it can access .NET and COM which gives you broad access to all the half-baked stuff MS have wedged in over the years.
Do not let topic to mix you up. My issue is a bit different from what asked frequently.
I have 6 command line tools and I want to pack them as 1 exe (or whatever) file.
Different part is, this not a malware to hide something behind other. They shouldn't run in same time. And I need to pass them command line parameters also.
What I already can do is to pack them (archive) and extract them to "filesystem" regarding to need. But this is also not what I look for. Trying to find something like unpacking directly to RAM etc. Or same logic as UPX like tools. And not to forget. Those exe's are not .Net stuff. I already found people asking about that but no also.
I think my demand is something with pain but. Hope to find someone experienced out of here.
You could unpack them into TEMP directory and remove when all things are finished. Very often this is a suitable approach.
Another way is to use commercial solutions like BoxedApp.
Anyway, Windows itself doesn't have a way to launch an exe (I suppose that mentioned command line tools are executable files, not batch files) from a memory. It is always a "hack" to emulate running a process from memory.
I'm looking for some type of solution for getting a window dev environment up and running quickly.
Currently we have a large setup document (50+ pages) for doing an install, and I'd like to automate this process as much as possible. The doc includes things like updating environment variables, installing programs, downloading source code, etc.
I know that the majority of these tasks can be done with a batch script, but that's kind of ugly and a lot of work. And while virtualization would be nice, it is not an option for us.
I'm wondering if anything exists for Windows that would make this less tedious. Something like Ruby's Chef would be great. Does anything like this exist for windows?
Well there is Pkgmgr.exe for unattended installation of windows components if you mix it with a powershell script you should be able to get what you want but it wont be as easy as using Chef. Check here for an example of what you can do with Pkgmgr.exe http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/133/using-unattended-setup-to-install-iis-70/
System Center is the Microsoft way of pushing out standard desktops. It's quite heavyweight mind you.
You could use VMWare for this. Just create a base machine image, with the necessary stuff installed, and point people at the VM.
Microsoft's "Windows Installer CleanUp Utility" could be used to help fix broken installations of MSI-installer based products. When the installer failed in some strange way and left corrupt data behind, so bad that even Add/Remove Programs couldn't help, you could often fix things by running this utility and then running the application's installer again.
I just discovered that Microsoft announced a couple weeks ago that they were discontinuing this utility. They didn't merely say "we're not supporting it anymore"; they seemingly removed it from their site entirely.
I have to support a Windows program for a whole bunch of users. Given the number of users, every so often something will go wrong, and this program has been invaluable for me, as a last-ditch line of defense.
I know I could point customers to some third party site that has a cached copy of it, but this seems dangerous (malware potential and such).
So, are there any replacement products? Or, if not, how can I myself do whatever it is that this program did?
To be clear, I'm not asking for help like "how do I programatically modify the registry". I can do that fine. But I need to know what in the registry needs to be modified.
Thanks in advance.
Windows Installer CleanUp utility was never intended to be used in the wild. It was only meant to be used by software developers. If you occasionally have end users needing to use WCU you have some serious installer quality issues that should be addressed.
WCU only removes the Windows Instaleller meta data and doesn't actually uninstall any software. This leaves the machine in a very dirty state. These days with test labs becoming virtualized there's no reason to have this tool anymore. You just roll back to a prior snapshot and keep on working.
I've seen all kinds of online forums full of users who think they know what they are doing ( and don't ) suggest using WCU to solve various problems so in the end Microsoft decided to try to get the horse back in the barn.
I have old copies of WCU archived in my CM system so if you'd like me to generate checksums to help you determine if you are getting a good copy just let me know.
The cleanup utility was a wrapper around the command line utility msizap.exe, described here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370523%28VS.85%29.aspx#1
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I recently had to struggle with one installation project (which uses most popular product for creating installations: InstallShield) to make it work for product upgrades (migrating from one version to another). In the end it turned out that I needed to use one long package code but was using some other. It wasted my 8 hours (testing and debugging installers is a pain).
Now if I think about it, once you are done all the hard part of coding, all you want to is that correct applications, libraries are copied to target computer and user just runs it. Period. This apparently simple task normally turns out to be a tricky one and "being closed to finish date" makes in even harder.
Don't you think deploying a product is made damn difficult on windows which should have been simpler? (or installer really deserves that much attention and I am just being crazy about it?)
Have you ever used simpler deployment schemes such as "copy the folder to wherever you like and run the exe. When you want to remove it, just delete the folder!"? Was it effective and made things simpler?
Painful as it is you need to wrestle with the windows installer for the benefit of your customers. Otherwise you will need to do a lot more work to
Handle situations where for some reason an error occurs during the installation. What do you do next?
Handle issues like security. What if the installing user does not have rights to particular folders/registry keys?
Correctly cleanup after installation
Patching and patch management
Performing additional tasks -- registering COM objects, creating databases, creating shortcuts, creating an un-installation shotcut and so on
Installing prerequisites
Letting users choose which features to install
Your own custom scripts to solve all these problems eventually become a bigger problem than the installation itself!
I recommend that you check out Wix. It's not exactly child's play but it gets the job done. If you install Votive as a visual studio add in you get intellisense to help you strucutre the tags correctly. With the help file you can create pretty functional flexible installations
I don't think you'll see too many disagreements here, especially regarding MSI. I think one thing to keep in mind is to watch the way many programs are using MSI files these days. Displaying UI dialogs and making complex configuration choices with an MSI is very weak simply due to the way Windows Installer was designed, so I've noticed a lot of programs being split into a bunch of baby MSIs that are installed with the minimal UI by a parent setup program. The SQL Server 2008 setup wizard does this. UPS WorldShip does this. And Paint.NET does this, too--the wizard you see is a Windows Forms app, and it launches msiexec itself (you can see the minimal UI of the Windows Installer pop up on top of the white wizard window), passing any configuration parameters as property arguments to msiexec.
A common scenario where this comes up is where someone is tasked with building an installer for an application that has both server and client counterparts. If the user chooses the server option, then they may or may not want a new database to be installed, which means installing SQL Server. But you can't just install SQL Server while you're in the middle of your own installation because Windows Installer won't let you do that. So a frequent solution is to write an app that displays a wizard that allows the user to configure all of the setup options, and then your app launches the MSI files as needed for SQL Server, your server application, and your client application in the minimal UI mode; basically, eschewing the "features" aspect of Windows Installer entirely and moving it up to the MSI level. 4.5's multiple-package installations seems to be a step further in this direction. This format is also especially useful if you also need to loop in non-MSI installers from third parties as part of your installation process, like installing a printer driver for some bizarre point of sale printer.
I'll also agree that Windows Installer lacks built-in support for common deployment scenarios. It's meant for when setup isn't XCOPY, but they seem to miss the fact that setup usually isn't just "files + shortcuts + registry keys," either. There are no built-in actions for setting up IIS Web sites, registering certificates, creating and updating databases, adding assemblies to the GAC, and so on. I guess they take the opinion that some of this should happen on first run rather than being a transactional part of the install. The freely available tooling and documentation has been awful--flat out awful--for the better part of a decade. Both of these issues are largely addressed by the WiX project and DTF (which lets you finally use managed code custom actions), which is why we're all so grateful to Rob Mensching and others' work on that project.
I've had the same experience. Installation can quickly suck up your time as you go down the rabbit hole of "Oh God, I guess I have to become an expert in this too." I second the idea that's it's best to address it early on in your project and keep it maintained as part of your build process. This way, you can help avoid that scenario of having developed a practically uninstallable product. (Trac was an example of this for a while, requiring to track down specific versions of weird Python libraries.)
(I could go on about how Windows Installer sometimes decides to use my slow, external USB hard drive as a place to decompress its files, how it seems to sit there doing nothing for minutes on end on computers that have had lots of MSI installs on them, and how that progress bar resetting itself a bazillion times during a single install is the most idiotic thing I have ever seen, but I'll save those rants for another day. =)
My two cents; please note that I really just know enough about Windows Installer to do damage, but this is my assessment coming from a small business developer just trying to use it. Good luck!
Well, its a lot easier if you build your installer first, make it part of your build system, and let it grow with your project.
I agree, the windows installer drives me insane. But there are a lot of situations that xcopy just doesn't solve. Sometimes you want to install for multiple users, not just the current user. Sometimes you have to register COM objects. Sometimes you have to make a whole bunch of changes to the system, such as registering services to run at startup, connecting to network servers, etc. Sometimes you have users that can't use a command prompt. And you always want to be able to role the whole thing back when something fails halfway through.
Was the whole MSI database approach the best way of doing it? I'm not sure. Would I rather pound nails into my head than write another line of WiX code? Probably. But you have to admit, it does a good job of doing everything you could ever possibly want. And when it doesn't there is always the CustomAction option.
Really, what I would like to see, is better documentation (really, what is a type 50 action? How about giving it a name?) and a lot more easy-to-usurp templates.
And the WiX users group alias does a good job of answering questions.
You should read RobMen's blog. He does a good job explaining why things are the way they are. He has done a lot of thinking (more than any human should) about the problems of setup.
Have you looked at NSIS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullsoft_Scriptable_Install_System ?
And 1: Yes, 2: No
Personally, I mostly agree with #Conrad and #John Saunders. I wrote about this topic a long time ago on my old blog. I think #jeffamaphone has a point about the Windows Installer complexity (and my over attention to setup, in general ) but I believe the Windows Installer is still the best all round option for installation on Windows.
"Once you have done all the hard part of coding", you haven't done a thing if all your hard work doesn't install. Installers need to be built and tested on every nightly build, every night, almost from day one. You need to test that the installer can be built and run, and you need to verify the installation.
Otherwise, who cares how much hard work you've done coding - nobody will ever see your work if it doesn't install!
Note that this also applies to XCOPY.
Another thing: what is your QA testing if they're not testing what your installer installs? You have to test what the customer will get!
For exactly the reasons you state, we've done internal releases, handled by the dev team by copying the required files, and then done the rest of the setup using scripts and our own utilities.
However, for end users you have to have some kind of hand holding wizard, I've used the MS installer from within VS and found it confusing and clunky. After that experience I've avoided the pain by getting others to do the installation step. Can anyone recommend a good .Net installer?
I use Installshield and if you are not trying to do anything too fancy (I why would you) then it's pretty straighforward - set initial setting, select files, set up shortcuts and create setup.exe.
All future updates I handle inside my code - much more convinient to the user