Best Practices

There's always a debate and a trade-off on how to distribute applications.  When talking with our clients about creating packages, we discuss three types; transforms, response files and recaptures.  MST files are always best, but to use that format 100% of the time is not always the best solution.  Running a setup capture may work for most of the legacy apps, but not all – just try packaging a driver or DirectX (for fun) and you’ll see what I mean.

So what we do is see if we can extract an MSI from an EXE.  If we can, we create a transform.  If not, we see if we can create a response file to run the native install silently. If we have to incorporate configuration files or reg keys, we’ll determine if we (a) create a script that executes everything, or (b) recapture everything.  A recapture is done if we can’t create a response file.  It’s also a good idea to think about the repair or uninstall process when looking at an install script.

We also consider the number of installs to be done; we draw the line at 5.  Anything less and we manually install it instead of creating a package.