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Hi all, It's been a few years since I've had to use any tools to create .msi installations for projects I've worked on, but I now have an upcoming project where I'm going to have to dive back in to this. What are your recommendations for .msi installer creation tools these days? I used to use Wise (never got on with Installshield from 3 or 4 years ago - too many bugs), but I'm wondering if there are newer/better kids on the block now? My project needs something a little more powerful than vs.nets install tool provides, and clickonce isn't suitable for this particualar app. Basically, I'm looking at creating an installer that has 2 or 3 applications in it, offer up custom install options etc. Nothing too horrendous, but not default easy either. Oh, the apps are .net apps if that matters. Just interested in what people are using these days, before I go and dig out my really old copy of wise! Thanks! Richard. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Previews Windows Search 4.0 eWeek, NY - 2 hours ago ... was released to manufacturing—many of those bugs were reported by you," Nick White, a product manager, said in a post on the Windows Vista team blog. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

http://www.ukuug.org/ooxml/ I don't get their points, they seem to be harping on about something they will never use anyway... implemented or otherwise. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft makes C++, Visual Basic 6.0 moves InfoWorld, CA - 2 hours ago Also included in the feature pack are a component for the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar, Visual Studio docking, auto hide windows, and Windows Vista theme support. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Vista SP1 reboot bug fixed, downloads to resume CIO Magazine, Australia - 14 minutes ago The Vista Servicing Stack Update (SSU) was a prerequisite for installing Vista SP1 via Windows Update that was made available by Microsoft in February. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Previews Windows Search 4.0 eWeek, NY - 20 minutes ago ... was released to manufacturing—many of those bugs were reported by you," Nick White, a product manager, said in a post on the Windows Vista team blog. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Vista beats OS X? Really? tuaw.com, CA - 1 hour ago Is more software, free and commercial, available for Windows Vista than OS X? Yes, without a doubt. Even more software is available for Windows XP than ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

After having a wee play last night, I sat down this morning and made a phone call to a work colleague to discuss a code change, was trying to scroll to the exact lines of code as I spoke to him... and weird things started happening on my screen.After I'd said I'd phone back in a minute, I suddenly realised... you dumb (I need to watch my language), you were playing with voice recognition last night :-)Basically I discovered that if you say the following in a New Zealand accent..."Hiya Dave, about that invoicing problem... ummm, hang on, what the f***, ummm.. hey, can I call you back in a minute?"is actually interpreted as "Open every application installed on machine, close them all, repeat fifty times, scroll each window up and down, open Excel, do some regression analysis.."..It was interesting. More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hi everyone I am using Menu with Multiview in ASP.NET 2.0 to get tab view. It works fine in IE but not in Firefox or Safari. The contents of each tab are going out of its tab area. You can get an idea*by opening*the following*test in IE and Firefox http://blogs.vbcity.com/mcintyre/archive/2006/11/07/6773.aspx Any replies will be welcom Thanks Maqsood More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft makes C++, Visual Basic 6.0 moves InfoWorld, CA - 28 minutes ago Also included in the feature pack are a component for the Office 2007 Ribbon Bar, Visual Studio docking, auto hide windows, and Windows Vista theme support. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Microsoft Releases 'Critical' Security Updates For Windows, Explorer - InformationWee <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Releases 'Critical' Security Updates For Windows, Explorer InformationWeek, NY - 54 minutes ago The updates apply to Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, as well as Explorer. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Vista beats OS X? Really? tuaw.com, CA - 33 minutes ago Is more software, free and commercial, available for Windows Vista than OS X? Yes, without a doubt. Even more software is available for Windows XP than ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Bruce Kyle of Microsoft and Stuart Celarier of CheckFree explore the new languages features in C#. It's a whirlwind tour of the important language features since C# 1. Stuart describes the feature and why it is useful. But doesn't get into best practices nor suggested usages. Just the facts about the feature. Whirlwinds are bite-sized webcasts, usally each is shorter than 15 minutes. You can start anywhere in the series to learn about the parts you're most interested in. In the final episode, Stuart's fingers get itchy. And instead of slides, he open up Visual Studio and shows code. This time, he shows how LINQ takes advantage of the new language features that are explained in the other Whirlwind episodes. He uses a code example in Visual Studio to show to use the C# language features to write a query using LINQ to Objects. He compares the same query using LINQ and extension methods that each contain a lambda expression. Next he describes the use of LINQ providers. These features are part of C# 3 in .NET 3.5. This screencast is also a great way to get started in with lanugage integrated queries (LINQ) or to explore the various ways you can use LINQ. Duration: 16:53 Other Whirlwind episodes: What's new in C# 2 Whirlwind 1 - Generics Whirlwind 2 - Iterators Whirlwind 3 - Partial types, Anonymous methods Whirlwind 4 - Accessors, Static Classes, Nullable TypesOther Whirlwind episodes: What's new in C# 3 Whirlwind 5 - Automatically Implemented Properties, Type Inference, Initializer Whirlwind 6: Anonymous types, Extension method Whirlwind 7 - Lambda ExpressionsOther videos of interest Getting Started with Windows Workflow Getting started with ASP.NET AJAXMore information For more information about this topic, see Stuart's Visual Stuart blog. For more information of interest to software developers, see the US ISV bloghttp://channel9.msdn.com/Photos/396483.jpg Watch the screencast(WMV) More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Microsoft Releases 'Critical' Security Updates For Windows, Explorer - InformationWee <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Microsoft Releases 'Critical' Security Updates For Windows, Explorer InformationWeek, NY - 16 minutes ago The updates apply to Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008, as well as Explorer. ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Yahoo in Talks With Google To Handle Some Search Ads More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Do you think the existence of Mono benefits Microsoft? If so why? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

I'm trying to use an XML entity in the App.config for a configuration value that appears in multiple appSettings. I see the entity shows correctly in the VS 2008 xml editor, but when ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["SQLConnectionString"] returns, I see the literal text and not the resolved text "server=server\&SQLInstanceName;;database=Search;Integrated Security=SSPI;Max Pool Size=75; Min Pool Size=5". Is this a bug in VS 2008 ConfigurationManager? Or is there a trick to make this work? ]> * *** *** * More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

This is a recording of a session at the Game Developer's Conference*given Shannon Posniewski, from Cryptic Studios. Shannon walks through the reasons why traditional relational databases simply don't scale to massive multiplayer online games. Listen to the podcast(MP3) Listen to the podcast(WMA) Download the Video Watch the Video More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

I am building a .Net app that uses some COM components thru Interop. The app uses a manifest file to identify the COM dlls so that they do not need to be registered.* This all works great. I am now writing unit tests to exercise my .Net assemblies that are making use of these COM components.* I would like to remain registration-free, but I don't know how to make use of a manifest file when executing the tests using NUnit. Has anyone done this or know if it is possible? More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

The compiler gurus over in C++ World (we spend a lot of time in*building 41)*have just released the latest CTP of the Phoenix Compiler Framework. It's been a while since we've learned about Phoenix here on Channel 9 so we thought it necessary to find out what's going on with the soon-to-be de facto compiler technology for all of Microsoft's products. Andy Ayers is an Architect on the Phoenix team. He sits down with us to dig into the details of Phoenix and address it's current state and future (no whiteboarding here, but this is still quite deep. There is a cool demo at the end of the interview.) . It's very interesting to note that the Phoenix team has tested the scalability and power of their pluggable (extensible) compiler framework on the likes of Windows. Turns out Phoenix handles such a large task (compiling Windows) very well. This new compiler technology has been designed with many-core in mind. This means Phoenix is our most parallelized compiler which adds up to shorter compilation time. As usual, the C++ team is ahead of the curve when it comes to preparing for the concurrent future. Tune in and learn all about the future of Microsoft's compiler technology from one of the minds behind it all. The future is very bright indeed! Enjoy! Low res version here. Listen to the podcast(MP3) Listen to the podcast(WMA) Download the Video Watch the Video More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

"Apple Should Buy Adobe," Cringeley Thinks – And He Explains Why - SYS-CON Media <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> "Apple Should Buy Adobe," Cringeley Thinks – And He Explains Why SYS-CON Media, NJ - 16 hours ago "This bold strategy is based on the high probability that - if something called Windows Vista ships at all next January - it will really be Windows XP SP4 ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hello, i need to know how to deploy a .net application and also how to it as a trial period application ......can anyone knows* please provide me a solution .......thank u..... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

Hello all. Having been down the road before where I have designed a system, told about it, and then realised the architecture was wrong from the off, I have decided this time to gather opinions on the best way to do this before starting anything. Basically, as many of you will already know, my primary application is epos. Each epos terminal holds a local SQLExpress database, containing all of its products etc. All tables in the database have a Int primary key. I have been asked to develop a web-based product management facility, so that users can log onto our web site, make product / price changes, and then send the changes down to their epos terminals. I plan to have the epos terminals check for updates online every hour or so, and download and implement changes as necessary. My main difficulty is figuring out how to store the data on my central SQL database. I want to be able to store all of the product data etc from many customers in one database, but as I have said before, the product data tables have Int Indexes.* Should I change indexes to a different type? If so, which? Alternatively, should I look at a different way of storing each individual database seperately? Unfortunately I cannot use SQL express, as my web host (DiscountASP) do not support this. I realise that I probably have missed a lot of important information, so please ask away .... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

"Apple Should Buy Adobe," Cringeley Thinks – And He Explains Why - SYS-CON Media <img alt="" height="1" width="1"> "Apple Should Buy Adobe," Cringeley Thinks – And He Explains Why SYS-CON Media, NJ - 15 hours ago "This bold strategy is based on the high probability that - if something called Windows Vista ships at all next January - it will really be Windows XP SP4 ... More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds

<img alt="" height="1" width="1"> Integrate your favorite search engine into Windows Vista TechRepublic, KY - 1 hour ago This blog post is also available in the PDF format in a TechRepublic download. As you may now, back in September 2006, I covered Vista’s Start Search ... Integrate your favorite search engine into Windows Vista TechRepublic all 2 news articles More... View All Our Microsoft Related Feeds