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leclseb
Level 2

Displaying a pop-up message/custom "please wait" dialog in basic MSI project?

Hello all,

We are currently working on a customized installer for one of our projects. We are using the basic MSI project type. In this project, we have a custom action which triggers after InstallWelcome and does some things in the background before the main install process (on initial install only). What it does is not at issue, but there may be a delay while it does it.

The annoyance with this is that the installation interview is over and that window is gone, but the installation progress window hasn't yet appeared. This means that the user could be looking at no window and no progress dialog for some time, which could lead to confusion. We would like to display a simple "please wait" message while the operations are done in the background, and then close/hide that window after the process is complete, which would be followed by the standard installation progress dialog.

We have looked into various avenues to do something like this but are left with no idea of how to proceed. We thought a billboard would be perfect as there would still be some kind of window displayed while the process takes place, but after playing around with those it does not seem that they work in the way we expected at all. We thought the billboard would display from the very start of the process, before the UI sequence, and would persist until the end, but instead it seems to not work at all or, according to some other people on the net, would only display specifically during installfiles, which is not what we want. We thought of trying for a custom dialog, but haven't found a quick or easy way that describes how to show a dialog on demand and how to close it. We do not need any next, previous, OK buttons or anything.

Essentially all we need is a quick and simple way to launch a dialog through InstallScript and then close it after our process, again with InstallScript. If we were doing this in VB, for example, all we'd have to do is create a custom form, insert a text control with "please wait", and then call its show method before our process and the form's close method after it. Simple, quick and easy. What would be the equivalent in InstallScript within a basic MSI project?
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weakness
Level 6

I don't test it. But I know the following URL.

Authoring a Conditional "Please Wait . . ." Message Box (Windows)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa367760(v=vs.85).aspx
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