Summary

This update is aimed to improve user’s experience with PACE Suite by bringing new features and improvements such as in-application support form, new INI file, ODBC, Registry and File import options and wizards and improved work with transforms, as well as addressing numerous issues that were reported by our users.

What’s new – general

• New in-application support and feedback form
  Now it is faster and easier to contact the support team to get help or send any feedback to developers. The new form also allows sending the debug data and a screenshot.
  

   

• Improved and re-designed PACE User Manual describes the main workflows of package creation and editing in a step-by-step style and has a lot of illustrations.
  

What’s new – MSI Editor 3.4.0 (PACE Suite v. 3.4)

New features

• Control over MSI features when importing resources
  With this release, MSI Editor received a new mechanism of MSI feature creation when importing files or registry into a package. Now it is possible to either choose an existing feature where the resources are imported, or make MSI Editor create new features automatically. If latter is chosen, then the tool will create features according to Microsoft recommendations and industry best practices (Per-user resources are assigned to a parent feature, per-machine to a child one, and components have unique key-paths).
  
  

   

• Extended registry import
  This release introduces the new wizard-style UI and a more advanced logic of registry import. Now both “add” and “remove” entries are recognized in REG files and populated into to Registry and RemoveRegistry tables in an MSI. Additionally, REG files of different encoding are now supported.
  

   

• New ways to work with transforms
  MSI Editor now allows working with Windows Installer transforms (MST) in a more flexible and handy way. It is possible to either create an empty new MST at the very beginning or generate an MST post facto based on changes made to an MSI file.
  
  MSI Editor now also allows merging MST with MSI
  

Improvements

• Improved INI files import
  MSI Editor detects INI files and allows to select in what way these INI files will be handled.
  
  The feature now provides three options:
  1. Install standard INI files via IniFile table and non-standard via File table (recommended) - all INI files, which have a proper INI structure are standard INI file and will be saved to the appropriate IniFile table; other files, which have INI extension but not a proper INI structure will be saved to File table as regular files. It is possible to view list of non-standard INI files and their errors by clicking “Show non-standard INI-files”.

  2. Install all INI files via File table - all INI files will be saved to File table as regular files.

  3. Install all INI files via File table and duplicate to IniFile table – all INI files will be saved to File table as regular files and additionally all standard INI files and a proper INI information from non-standard INI files will be duplicated to IniFile table. This approach gives ability to keep original INI file structure (save comments and INI sections order, etc) while populating hard-coded INI values via MSI properties.
  
• The improved Recent files list allows to return to either an MST or an MSI.
  

   

• New and simple Help menu makes it easier to access help.
  

Bug fixes

• Fixed import of incorrect or corrupted REG files without any messages.
• Fixed bugs related to working with MST (applying/removing/saving).
• Fixed crash on creation new registry key in the Registry tab.
• Fixed crash on hiding empty folder in the Files tab in some cases.
• Fixed the issue related to resizing last column of grid in the Tables, Files, Registry and Property tabs.
• Fixed empty space in the context menu of the Shortcut tab.
• Fixed incorrect naming of automatically created components (name could exceeded max length in some cases).
• Fixed crash that appeared while using recent file list in some cases.
• Fixed incorrect INI file renaming when it is present in both File and IniFile tables.
• Fixed bugs related to parsing of non-standard INI files.
• Fixed the problem that led to broken uncompressed folder structure next to an MSI file upon import of new uncompressed files.
• Fixed the problem when a file with the same name could not be imported twice in the same location.
• Fixed the issue that prevented showing imported registry or extracted COM information on the Registry tab.
• Fixed incorrect renaming folders in the MSI in case it contains uncompressed files.
• Numerous fixes of wrong behavior of UI controls (for example: disabled Next and Finish buttons; disabled Create new feature checkbox; etc.)
• Fixed too long file names and paths in recent file list.
• Fixed crash on executing ICE validation in some cases.
• Fixed wrong GUID of automatically created components (if new registry key was added on the Registry tab into an empty registry root key.)
• Fixed the issue of not changing the Custom Action’s icon according to the selected source type.
• Fixed crash that appeared after undoing some operations.
• Fixed crash on changing some data on the Application and Features/Components tabs.
• Fixed the issue of wrong naming of new CAB files.
• Fixed problem of not updating the Summary Info information such as “Last Saved By” and “Saved”.

What’s new – MSI Generator 3.3.0 (PACE Suite v. 3.4)

New features

• The new ODBC settings in profile options allows choosing how to handle ODBC information: use Registry table or ODBCDataSource table. Using Registry table instead of ODBCDataSource one may be useful e.g. when you need to capture ODBC connection settings but ODBC driver is not installed in the packaging environment or database is not accessible.
  

Improvements

• TypeLib MSI table is now not used by default, as per Microsoft’s recommendation and packaging best practices. This allows to avoid wrong behavior on MSI rollbacks or just during package installation.
  

   

• Improved REG file parser
  Now import of registry files works more stable and reliably

   

• New and simple Help menu makes it easier to get a help.
  

Bug fixes

• Fixed the issues that prevented from building an App-V 5 package with the message “Some error occurred during creating App-V 5”.
• Fixed inaccurate relative path detection for lower case drive letters (e.g., previously ‘c:\’ was not detected as relative paths in App-V 5.0).

More information you can find in the Release notes at http://www.infopulse.com/Global/PACE/PACE-Suite-3.4-Release-notes.pdf