Transform Wizard

Change the way you package applications

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Creating transforms that comply with all Microsoft validation standards and which are error free has never been easier.

 

Customising MSI packages can traditionally be done in one of 2 ways. Either the package is opened in an editor which supports the creation of transforms and the package is modified by hand to achieve the desired results or the second approach is to use the response transform mechanism to step through the installation dialogs and record the user responses in a transform file.
 

Tools

Both Wise and InstallShield have a tool to do this. Wise has the install tailor and InstallShield has the tuner. Both work on the same principle of opening the InstallUISequence table and stepping through it to record the responses and then saving the results into a transform that can be applied at install time on users machines.

Problem
There is no obvious problem with this approach and in fact it should be the perfect solution for any packager since it takes only a few minutes to completely configure an application for distribution to hundreds or thousands of users. The issue arises in the implementation. Both tools suffer from 2 obvious flaws. The first is that they capture more changes to the MSI than are required to customise the install to the users requirements. The second is that they create transforms that cannot be applied to their original MSIs without suppressing Transform validation errors. This makes troubleshooting and editing these transforms much more difficult. For some reason both of these tools can be very slow to start in the first place.

Solution
To solve this problem we created Transform Wizard to create response transforms. The difference between Transform Wizard and the other vendor tools is that we do not attempt to capture all of the changes throughout the MSI during the session. Only the responses to the UI are captured. By capturing changes only to these tables the transform is much cleaner and can be manipulated in any other third party tools. By only using these tables and generating the transform on the target platform the resulting MST is fully compliant and requires no error suppression in order to be applied to the base MSI.

 

Additional Benefits

Transform Wizard allows packagers to set Packaging Standards through the UI which are saved between sessions. This way, all packaging standards are applied to each package created with Transform Wizard. These can be tweaked as required for each package being created. Install and Uninstall scripts are also automatically created which allows for easy deployment either manually or via your chosen software distribution tool.

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Simply download the transform wizard and enter your email address to receive a free license to start creating transforms (MSTs) in minutes. With complete support for packaging standards and a fast transform generation engine you can be setup and create your first transform in under 5 minutes.