Silverlight definition

Here’s an interesting definition of Silverlight as viewed on MSDN :

“Silverlight is a browser plug-in that renders XAML and exposes a JavaScript programming interface.”

This definition looks simple enough…for a 1’st post under this chapter.

VS installers & custom actions

How to retrieve installation directory inside the Installer class code ?

Introduction

Recently in one of the work projects I needed to create a msi installer with custom actions.

In order to create Custom Actions for Visual Studio Installers, the Installer class should be inherited.

Different parameters like the installation target directory can be made visible to inside C# or VB code by setting a CustomActionData parameter on the custom action entry in the “Custom Actions” view inside setup project:

/targetDir=”[TARGETDIR]\”

The list of available properties can be found in the MSDN library (Start -> … -> “Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Documentation”) and then follow the next steps:

1) On the “Contents” tab check that “Filtered by” is set to “Unfiltered”.

2) Then follow the node path in the treeview to the left:

Win32 and COM Developement ->Setup ->Windows Installer ->Windows Installer ->Windows Installer Guide ->Properties

Next, for example the above code can be used to retrieve the list of all parameters inside Context.Parameters StringDictionary collection:

private String GetDictionaryContent(IEnumerable dict)
{

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in dict)

{

 sb.AppendFormat("key={0}, value={1}\n", entry.Key, entry.Value);

 }

return sb.ToString();

}

Call this method  inside one of the custom actions like shown here:

[...]

string parameters = GetDictionaryContent(Context.Parameters));

System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show(parameters);

[...]

That’s it. This method can be uses to visualize and use inside the custom’s action code, certain environment parameters visible only inside the Visual Studio’s Setup File Viewer section.