Standalone build.

[Hamilton-Scott]

It's time to revisit this again and maybe it has been covered already?

In previous releases there have been problems reported using the standalone build. I have the sab installed on a build server and it works well (12.0). As I understand it I'm right to say you can run existing projects through the sab but it naturally has no IDE capabilities but for some reason I remember something on the lines that there were problems licencing or using the sab.

The sab is intended to let non-IDE users build existing projects so is there a usage problem with it in 2008? I'm naturally reluctant to even want of thinking to upgrade the sab unless I know I it can be used without a problem?

Any thoughts?

[Christopher_Pai]

I'm not really sure I understand your question. I upgraded to IS2008 SAB and everything worked just fine:

http://blog.deploymentengineering.com/2007/05/tip-parallel-is122008-builds-using-tfs.html

Since I'm using TFS I just had to make a tweak to the ISPROJ file to point to the new IS2008 MSBUILD provider. Even though the source project is checked in 12 format, it gets converted and built on the fly.

This allowed me to continue to develop in 12 until I felt comfortable that 2008 was good.

[Hamilton-Scott]

Christopher, the specific problems I had was the SAB did not run when installed from the CD. I had to copy some of the files in the SAB to another folder in the SAB (I forget which) as there were runtime errors during the build complaining about files not being found. This admittedly should not have been necessary but it's what I had to do.

Once I got it all working and the projects were building ok I then put another project together to take the SAB folder so that could be installed on other machines. I'd like to think the SAB will install and be 100% usable but I'm mindful that I may have to copy some of installed files into other files in the SAB like I do at the moment.

There were quite a few files in the 'wrong' folders. I don't think any were involved with merge modules as I don't use any. Hope that is clearer.

[rchand445]

The only usage problem I have found in the sab so far is building one click install projects where the build digitally signs media for Netscape browsers. The build process errors out with "error -4702: An error occurred creating 'install.jar'".

I found that the sab was missing the file "ISSetupApplet.class", and Netscape's version of "signtool.exe".

It gets confusing, because the sab is installed with Microsoft's version of signtool.exe, which is currently used to digitally sign files using Microsoft's Authenticode technology and is available with Visual Studio 2005 or the Platform SDK.

The sab needs both versions of the tool to digitally sign files if you want to be compatible for both Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers.

My Installshield project uses the build engine to digitally sign files for Netscape browsers only, so I was able to temporarily work around the error by a) saving off sab's current version of signtool.exe then b) copying Netscape's version of signtool.exe and ISSetupApplet.class from the IDE to the root folder of the sab. Both of these files are found in the folder C:\Program Files\Macrovision\IS2008\Support. Netscape's version of signtool is 701.kb.

To digitally sign setup media for Internet Explorer compatibility, I am calling Microsoft's signtool from a script after the build is compete.

I called this problem into Installshield support.

Other than that, so far I have not encountered build errors which were caused by sab files being in the wrong folders, which was a problem with earlier versions of the standalone build module.

[rchand445]

Support assigned work order #IOC-000060835 to this issue.