Easy MSI: A basic guide to Windows Installer

Dear Reader, When I had to learn the MSI (Microsoft Installer) technology, I was quite surprised at how much there is to know and how little info is available! There are many tools like InstallShield, Wise, or Windows Installer XML (WiX) and you can even use Visual Studio for that purpose. However all these tools and IDEs are actually just wrappers around the core technology - a relational database stored in a structured storage file. This book teaches you how you can productively use free MSI editors to develop an installer for anything you want - without any need to buy expensive third-party tools. Understanding how the MSI internals work will put you in a position where you are able to create and fix any MSI package for any installation purpose. The book is written for software developers, deployment engineers, system administrators, or anybody else who wants to learn creating installer package using the MSI technology. The book is ideal both for MSI beginners and advanced learners who are looking for a reference book helping them with their daily work. The book comes with a homepage www.easy-msi.com where you can download tools, sample solutions, and the answers for the self-test questions that close each chapter in order to measure your understanding. Sincerely, Robin Fischer