CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windows-installer
DA COOLIST OF DOODS
DA COOLIST OF DOODS

Reputation: 13

How were MSIs created originally?

I can't find a single thing online that describes an old tool created by Microsoft for creating MSI files. How did MS expect people to make MSIs when the feature was added to Windows?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 252

Answers (2)

Rob Mensching
Rob Mensching

Reputation: 35866

If you are asking about the very first tool the Windows Installer team used to create MSI databases, that would be msidb.exe. msidb.exe was used to import tables into the MSI using the tab-delimited text archive file format known as .idt files. The idt file format is documented. Funny enough, that documentation now tells you to use the tools that @Stein Asmul describes in his answer.

But, if you want to know how the Windows Installer team created MSI files before I created Orca as an intern in 1999, the team used msidb.exe.

Upvotes: 2

Stein Åsmul
Stein Åsmul

Reputation: 42126

Deployment Tools: In theory you could create MSI files with the MSI SDK tool Orca back in the day - a neat, but simple tool to view and edit MSI files via raw table display. In reality Microsoft partnered with deployment tool vendors such as Installshield and Wise (now defunct) back then in the late 90s, early 2000s. Other vendors - such as Advanced Installer have emerged since.

These tools offered a GUI front end to the new MSI database format so you wouldn't need to update all relational tables manually for basic operations. Instead the GUI of the third party tools facilitated adding files and resources via an intuitive task-based GUI. Later WiX came along with a text-based source code for MSI files and the compilation of an MSI file from the text source. Here is an old answer on WiX - which unofficially tries to summarize its major benefits and rationale.

Orca: Orca is installed with Visual Studio and the Windows SDK. Try searching for Orca-x86_en-us.msi - under Program Files (x86) and install the MSI if found (you can try under this parent folder: %SystemDrive%\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\ - but the exact location could change).

Upvotes: 0

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