The Installation Sequence

There are three types of installation currently available for Windows Installer and two sequences within each mode of install.  These modes are:

• Simple Installation
• Administrative Installation
• Advertisement Installation.

As packagers, we are almost always concerned with the Simple Installation type.  Each of these modes also has a GUI and non-GUI mode that will run if dialogs are going to be presented.

Modern commercial environments are designed to allow applications to be remotely installed.  When the application is remotely pushed onto a machine, the use account that is being used to install the product won’t actually have a Graphical Environment.  It would be completely pointless to have dialogs asking questions because the user at the other end would not be able to see the dialogs if they did occur. 

We want to ensure that any package we create (or amend) works consistently on all machines that it’s deployed to.   This is why we use “Simple Installation” and no Graphical Environment for authoring actions or events within the installation process.  This table is known as the InstallExecute table.