Purpose and Background

I am creating this blog as a means for getting my installation successes and struggles out to others so that it may in turn help them. Hopefully someone saves some effort by what I will supply here, or you get a laugh out of my errors. Either way, it was useful. I will be posting code snippets as well as parts of log files and InstallShield screen shots to show what I am doing to accomplish tasks in our installers.

My background was that after school I started work at InstallShield as a support person on their MSI product which was InstallShield for Windows Installer 2 (2.03 to be precise). I started my career off right by hanging up on my first customer (kind of like what you have to do your first day in prison, or so the movies tell us). I would challenge myself by giving support to Express customers without using the IDE, just going off memory. Anyone who has worked support knows that it can wear on you after time, though after the fact I am thankful that we had shifts and were not locked down on the phone the entire day. Because of the grind I looked for a new challenge and it ended up being as a Technical Trainer for InstallShield.

As a trainer I was fortunate to work with a few intelligent people who helped bring my knowledge of MSI to another level and that was E. S. and R. D., who both still work for now Flexera in different roles. I enjoyed educating others on MSI (as well as the other products I taught) . My main angle in the classroom was to teach them not to memorize, but how to learn MSI so that after they left they knew where to go for assistance. For example, when an entry is made in InstallShield's System Search for a registry key search, what really happens in the background of the ISM (what will become the MSI) tables. After teaching for a bit it was nice to get a bit of a break from the travel and I was able to work on writing with our training manuals and for a short period of time they offered training videos which, along with R.D., I was a part of recording (or as they refer to it in their business, the "talent"). After the video recording I will never understand how people can talk into a camera as a job. Eventually traveling took its toll on me and I moved to a new role, one that became not as technical as I thought it would be.

A few years later I ended up at a company in Chicago as an Install Engineer. I got a lead on the position from a former InstallShield person who wanted more of a developer role. The funniest part of the process was that during my interviews I kept getting pounded for being a trainer and they wanted me (the recruiter and even the managers who were hiring me) to focus on my support experience. Evidently most trainers know little of the product, just the manual they teach from. It worked out well because during my interview I actually solved a problem the lead was having at the time.

My role here consists of creating automated build cycles, setting up and managing our build environments (both virtual and physical), and creating and troubleshooting installers. Our installers span a range from one where we simply call a batch file (not my favorite) to one where we have many custom actions that interact with IIS to accomplish tasks such as (the Iraq, Maps) auto-populate a combo box based on those retrieved values and setting properties on application pools. As for tools, we use InstallShield 2009, Install Anywhere, Visual Build Professional, MS Platform SDK, VMWare Workstation and VMWare ESXi server, and our source control system is Team Foundation. I have dabbled a little in Wix and maybe one day will convert to that. Most of our custom actions are done in VBScript with some InstallScript, but I am trying to force myself to go to managed code for all my future actions. If that is a success then one day to go back and rewrite all others as well.

Hope you enjoy,
WW