The company I work for is upgrading servers from Windows 2000 to Windows 2008. I've been tasked with the project of updating the MSIs of the existing web applications so the MSIs will work with the Win2k8 servers. In addition, we have a new policy that each web application must run in it's own application pool in IIS.
I was hoping I could just create a transform to add and configure an application pool for all the MSIs. However, in InstallShield 8, it doesn't appear like I can add an application pool via a transform 😞
Is there some other magic way I can modify existing MSIs to add application pools? I don't have a lot of experience with creating transforms, so perhaps I'm missing something obvious.
You may be able to accomplish this by building a new version of your MSI project that contains the application pool. Then, it should be possible to generate a transform from the Create/Apply Transform wizard from the Tools menu.
Note that this could also be accomplished through a patch created with the Patch Design view.
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, it sounds like your proposed solution would require the existence of an InstallShield project in order to create the transform, correct? Some of the MSIs I have to upgrade weren't created with InstallShield and so there isn't an existing InstallShield project to work with. I was hoping to build a transform that could update any MSI, regardless of how it was created.
A project would be required to work with the IIS functionality provided in InstallShield. If the existing MSI packages were created with a tool other than InstallShield, none of the IIS support InstallShield provides would be present in the package, and therefore, creating an application pool would be more complicated than just adding a row to an existing table.
It could be possible to accomplish this without a project, but most of the methods of doing this would be rather complicated and error prone.
