Hello, I was wondering if anyone knew if what I propose here sounds feasible? I am having a tough time with the lack of functionality in the dialog boxes in a basic MSI project and am looking for much tighther control over a given data collection form that I want to build. Such as notification of events like a given control gaining or losing focus. I am also facing challenges with getting the mask edit control to work the way I want, or think it should. Anyway, what I was planning on doing was developing a custom .dll in C++ that had one function in it and that function would be to display a simple form and capture the user input. I know that I can set Windows Installer Properties with the data captured from the form which would be just fine for what I want to do.
Does this sound remotely feasible to anyone? I am not a C++ programmer so this is not going to be all that easy for me, but it looks like it is the only way to get the tight control over the form that I want.
MSI supports External UI handlers. InstallScript MSI is based on this. Traditionally this has required a bootstrapper to pass the callback handle into MSI but recent versions of MSI support a mechanism for embedding the external ui handler into the package.
BTW, do you have a dependency on .NET 2.0 already? WiX's DTF has recently released and it has the possibility to doing all of this in C# with Winforms or WPF.
Thanks for the quick reply Christopher. I am not sure I understood much of what you said though. Yes, I do have a dependency on .NET 2.0 already and am much better at developing in VB.NET than I would be in C++. Could I do the same thing in VB.NET?
