I agree. I can think of at least 2 occasions where I've wanted to buy you a beer Robert. As a follow-up question, can you use this same technique for redistributables such as for example, when you need to set the SA password when installing MS SQL Express (etc.)? ... View more

Prefect! Thanks very much! ... View more

Hi Michael The problem I'm having is that I need to test both the OS as well as the service pack installed on the target system. There is an issue with SQLExpress 2005 SP3 that can cause the blue screen of death when it tries to upgrade older versions SQLExpress when on XP SP2 or lower. Who knows when this could be fixed by Microsoft. With prerequisite conditions I haven't as yet found one registry key or file that allows me to effectively test both the OS and service pack version installed. Because of this I would need to use 2 prerequisite conditions, one to test to OS and one to test the service pack installed. But if condition1 is OS >= XP and condition2 is SP >= 3 this works for XP but will fail with Windows 7. So far the only reliable solution I've come up with is to check if any version SQLExpress is installed and if so, don't install SQLExpress. This then forces any required clean-up/upgrade of SQLExpress to be something the end user must do manually before continuing the installation. When I find myself heading towards solutions like this, I usually think I must be missing something. Thanks for any suggestions. As a side note, how can I put in an enhancement request to add nested prerequisite conditions to prerequisites? ... View more

Thanks! That works great! ... View more

Hi tcom I've come across this problem too. We have customers with older versions of our product in which SQLExpress SP2 was installed. Because they’re running on a XP SP2 box, when SQLExpress SP3 tried to upgrade the previous installation it would explode and in a few cases it’s reported that this cause the blue screen of death. See http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqlsetupandupgrade/thread/68f6527f-7109-44f2-bd05-538339e2f76b This bug in a Microsoft problem, but I wonder if the short term solution is to just test the target system and if the OS is XP SP2 just stop the installation of SQLExpress and tell the end user the install SP3. Since this redistributable runs as a prerequisite then I would guess adding another condition to the SQLExpress would to the trick. The problem I’m having is that I haven’t found one registry entry that is reliable for testing what OS and SP the installer is running on. Or is there a way to add some kind of conditional statement to conditions, so if condition X is true try condition Y? ... View more

If your building an InstallScript project, not an Basic MSI or InstallScript MSI project, then under Media | Releases | and on the Setup.exe tab there is an option to set the exe icon. This option doesn't seem available for MSI projects, but I think is should be. ... View more