Windows Installer Concepts and Terminology

The following sections describe some basic concepts and terminology you will encounter when working with windows installer (MSI) installation programs.

Advantages

Microsoft Windows Installer is an installation and configuration service.

The Windows Installer reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your customers by enabling them to efficiently install and configure your products and applications. The installer can also provide your product with new capabilities to advertise features without installing them, to install products on demand, and to add user customizations.

Features and Components

Internally, an MSI product installation is defined as a tree structure. Made up of features, components, and application data.

A feature is the smallest separately installable collection of data from the end user's standpoint.many third-party MSI installations display a custom setup dialog box in which user can select what parts of the product to install: each Separate icon in the custom setup dialog is a feature.

Click to view.

Features can contains sub features, sub-sub-features, and so forth.

A component is the smallest separately installable piece of a product from the installation developer's standpoint.All of the component must be installed to the same directory,and under the same conditions: there is no mechanism for installing only part of a component. The user never directly interacts with components. Instead, all the components contained in selected features will, by default, be installed to the target system.

The sample has the following specifications:

• The application is provided to users as a self-installing Windows Installer package that installs all the required files, shortcuts, and registry information.
• The installation package may present a UI wizard to the user during setup to collect user information.
• During setup, users have the option of selecting individual features to be installed to run-locally, to run-from-source, or to not be installed.
• One of the features can be presented to users as an install-on-demand feature.
• The same package uninstalls the application and removes all the application files and registry information from the user's computer.

The package is prepared to receive a major upgrade that includes changing its product code.