May 18, 2004 at 6:03 am
Maybe slightly OT, but here I go anyway. I tried using the release candidate for MSDE deployment in conjunction with a Windows Forms application written using Visual Studio 2003. I tested this on various Windows XP Pro machines and installations, and all showed the same behaviour.
The first installation seemed to work well, but the installation crashed in the second stage (after the MSDE installation, during the Windows app installation) whilst attaching the database to the MSDE instance. Once I fixed that bug the installation seemed to work fine on a fresh windows installation.
However, any computer that already had an instance of MSDE installed no longer worked when using the bootstrap installer. The bootstrap started by uninstalling the MSDE instance, which it often got right. After that it tried to install the instance again, but at the end of the installation it just disappeared, carried on running in the windows processes with 9 MB memory, and 0 CPU time, and if you leave it it carries on indefinately.
If I kill that process I can then install the windows app on top of this without using the bootstrapper, but this is obviously unacceptable behaviour for release. You cannot, however, seem to get the bootstrapper to fully uninstall the MSDE instance after you have had to kill it once. The bootstrapper does not publish the MSDE instance under add/remove programs, which is fine for release, but has made debugging impossible.
This behaviour seemed to be the same even on installations where the windows app install/uninstall was succesful. After the first installation instance, the bootstrapper no longer worked properly.
Does anyone have any experience with the bootstrapper and deployment toolkit, and have you experienced/got round these problems (especially with Visual Studio 2003), if so how? Does anyone know when/if MS plan to make this a fully supported toolkit instead of a Release Candidate?
May 19, 2004 at 7:01 pm
Theres a good section in the books on line for this. Part of the problem seems to be with Windows installer. If you have the MSI editing tool ORCA, you can open up the MSI, then go to the properties table, and change the PRODUCTCODE to a different GUID. Use the guid generator from microsoft to come up with one, but be careful as some of the letters come out in lower case, and you'll need tochange them. Then go to View>Summary Information and do the same for the package and upgrade codes. I would also add INSTANCENAME to the property tableassign it a value. If this is a commercial release, its probably a good idea to do so, in order to not conflict with another SQL SERVER instance. The problem you experienced with reinstalling is something that troubled me for some time with one of my releases. If you delete(or rename as a safer option) the folder created by your installation(another reason to specify your own instance name), you should then be able to reinstall without problem. The folder would be something in the order of [PROGRAMFILESFOLDER]\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL$INSTANCENAME. Look up desktop engine in the books online and make sure youre distributing SP3a.
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