Friday, July 20, 2007

Advertising info

The Darwin Descriptor for COM Advertising is stored as the InProcServer32 registry value.
The advertised shortcut's TargetPath is a combination of the ProductCode & Darwin Descriptor + some tags. Open the shortcut using ex. notepad and you'll find the descriptor there.
A Darwin Descriptor is an encoded string and when decoded produces a combination of the ProductCode, Feature & ComponentId(s).As the Darwin Descriptor is stored as a "REG_MULTI_SZ" entry it can contain more then one descriptor where other packages may have installed the same component.
You should be able to find Darwin Descriptors under the following locations

HKCR\CLSID\(clsid)\InprocServer32
HKCR\Installer\AssembliesHKCR\Installer\Components
HKCR\Installer\Win32Assemblies
HKCR\(progid)\shell\(mycustomname;)\command
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\(sid)\Products\(compressed)\Features(targetpath)

Contributor: AngelD (from juice.altris.com)

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Property passing in Custom action

If you want to pass property or a directory in Custom action then u can use Set Property Custom Action and place it after Cost Finalize. Name the property with the name of the Custom Action you want to pass it to. Then you can retain this property in Custom Action by Session.Property, If you are running this Custom Action in Deffered mode then you need to pass parameter as CustomActionData and if you are running this CA in Immediate Execution then you need to directly pass the property name.You can pass more that one property, by set property CA, by separating it with ";"Also while retrieving these valuues you need to split the variable in you retrieved from Session.Property.

Monday, May 14, 2007

Modify the System and User Paths

SUMMARY: The PATHMAN DOS command can make it easier to modify the system and user paths used by Windows XP.

If you are in the C:\TEMP directory and type in NETSTAT at a command prompt to view active connection statistics, Windows will most likely not find "netstat.exe" in the C:\TEMP directory.

However, the C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory is in what's called the path, or a list of directories Windows uses if it can't find an executable in the current directory. Since C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 contains the file "netstat.exe", Windows will run the command from there.

By using the SET command with the PATH environment variable, you can modify Windows XP's path. However, doing so can be messy and error-prone.

If you frequently need to modify the PATH, the Windows 2003 Resource Kit comes built-in with a command called PATHMAN, or Path Manager, that lets you cleanly modify the system and user paths.

To use this command, you'll need to first
download and install the Windows 2003 Resource Kit.

Then you can run pathman.exe and use one of the following options:

/as PATHAdds a semicolon-separated PATH to the system path
/au PATHAdds a semicolon-separated PATH to the user path
/rs PATHRemoves a semicolon-separated PATH from the system path
/ru PATHRemoves a semicolon-separated PATH from the user pathExamples:C:\>pathman /as c:\morecommands
This adds the directory "c:\morecommands" to the system path.
After restarting the current command prompt or opening a new command prompt, any batch files or executables located in the "c:\morecommands" directory are now executable from anywhere on your system.
Type the following command in a new DOS window to see your modified PATH environment variable:
C:\>set path
Now, to remove the directory from the path:C:\>pathman
/rs c:\morecommands
This removes the directory "c:\morecommands" from the system path.
After restarting the current command prompt or opening a new command prompt, any batch files or executables located in the "c:\morecommands" directory will only be executable from within the "c:\morecommands" directory.
Type the following command in a new DOS window to see your modified PATH environment variable:
C:\>set path


Source:
http://malektips.com/xp_dos_0017.html