A little work blog

What next? Requests?

leegend — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:44:48 +0000

As it turns out, over 63% of visitors have been to one of just 2 articles (Sweet VBScript – command line parameters and VBScript Current Directory or Folder) I’m puzzled. These are brilliantly useful articles, but is there anything else people are trying to get done? VBScript? Powershell? Windows Installer? If you have questions or requests, put them up!

VBScript Delete a File

leegend — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 23:09:22 +0000

Deleting a file is fairly simple in VBScript. First you’ll want to declare a File System Object so that you can interact with the file system. I’ve usually got a line near the top of my scripts

Set objFSO = CreateObject(“Scripting.FileSystemObject”)

Then you can delete a file easily using DeleteFile:

objFso.DeleteFile “C:\Temp\temp.file”

Visual C++ 1603 errors

leegend — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:06:57 +0000

A number of applications including Acrobat Pro, ArcGIS, Visual Studio and AutoCAD can at times fail with error 1603. It’s been a little while since I saw this, but the symptoms are something like:

Software installations on the machine fails without a clear error message (In our case it was: “Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Failed Installation aborted, Result=1603”). (From OpenLM Software Licensing Blog)

The resolution for this is to set the Registry Size Limit to “unlimited” and then reboot:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\RegistrySizeLimit
Type: REG_DWORD
Value: 0xffffff (4294967295)

SCCM software distribution best practices

leegend — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 02:30:06 +0000

There are a variety of different methods for configuring SCCM software distribution and reasons for choosing one way or the other. I’m going to look to expand this list, but would emphasise that this is personal opinion. Without any consultation or authority, here are what I consider to be best practice for some tasks in SCCM:

Programs that upgrade installed software, set the Environment to Program can run: Only when no user is logged on. This will reduce the likelihood of software being in use and failing to upgrade/uninstall as expected.
Programs that reboot, set the Environment to Program can run: Only when no user is logged on. This isn’t always practical, but if you wanted to upgrade something like Internet Explorer and you want or require a reboot, try and get it to run when nobody’s using the PC.

Adobe CS5.5 Help Content

leegend — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 23:44:30 +0000

As ever, Adobe refuse to make things straight forward in installing their Creative Suite. To their credit, the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition (AAMEE) is getting better, but there’s still this tricky point that you need to install help separately to the main installation.

What happens si you step through AAMEE creating an installation and you wind up with 2 folders, Build and Exceptions. The Build folder contains the stuff you selected in the install and an msi to execute. So far, sounds good. However to have Help available via the menus you’ll need to install AIR and then install the Help content. Once you’ve got AIR installed, you can get your content installed by running something like:

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe AIR\Versions\1.0\Adobe AIR Application Installer.exe” -silent -eulaAccepted “%PATH%\32\Exceptions\AdobeHelp\AdobeHelp.air”

What happens with the Help content is that it doesn’t download to a single location on the machine, but goes into the user’s profile in a folder called “%APPDATA%\chc.4875E02D9FB21EE389F73B8D1702B320485DF8CE.1″. You can try co-ordinating this centrally, but it may not function correctly (as in display anything) for all CS programs.

Uninstall Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) silently – how to

leegend — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 03:20:08 +0000

Ah Adobe, those merchants of all things difficult. While investigating their CS5.5, a need to uninstall CS5 installations presented itself. Sounds simple enough right? Their new Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition generates an msi, I’ll just uninstall that. No, that doesn’t work.

Next thing is it turns out there’s another entry in the registry for what gets executed if you manually uninstalled it, something like this: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\OOBE\PDApp\core\PDApp.exe –appletID=”DWA_UI” –appletVersion=”1.0″ –mode=”Uninstall” –mediaSignature=”{A1BC7068-C1BA-410F-8B9A-DB807C803DE2}”

Maybe I can run that with some sort of silent switch… No that doesn’t work either.

What you need to do is go back to the original source for your CS5 install, into the Adobe CS5\deploy folder and grab one of the uninstall-en xml files. In my case, I grabbed the uninstall-en_GB.xml. Then you’ll still actually need to use a different Setup.exe for the uninstall, you’ll want to use the one in the DWA folder, not the Core folder and finally you’ll end up with a command like:

“C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\OOBE\PDApp\DWA\Setup.exe” –mode=Silent –deploymentFile=”%PATH%\uninstall-en_GB.xml”

and you can replace %PATH% with the location of this xml file.

And keep swearing at Adobe…

How to run VBScript

leegend — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:07:28 +0000

There are a few ways to run VBscript. I will attempt to outline some methods briefly.
Firstly, VBScript is generally saved into a file with extension .vbs (eg MyScript.vbs), some other file types are .vbe, .wsf, .wsc, but I primarily deal with .vbs. VBScript does not need to be compiled, so these files can be human read.

My primary method of running or executing VBScript is to open a command prompt, then to type cscript then the name of the script. If the script file is in a different folder (eg c:\Temp) you would need to type cscript C:\Temp\MyScript.vbs

You can use wscript rather than cscript in a command prompt, but the main difference is that if there are any dialogue boxes or output, cscript will write this into the command window, but wscript will create a dialogue box which you probably need to click for the script to continue. I generally write scripts that shouldn’t need any interaction, so cscript is better for me.

Another option is to double click on the script in explorer. This will run wscript and use that directory as the working directory. This is great for scripts where you want interaction, but it means you can’t easily do something tricky like provide parameters.

Hope this brief overview helps!

Shims with the Application Compatibility Toolkit

leegend — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:25:08 +0000

So you’ve got a problem with your app running on Vista or Windows 7? It might run fine on XP or as an admin or something similar, so that being the case, often you can shim it up to make it work.
What you’ll want to do is:

Install Microsoft’s Application Compatibility Toolkit, currently at v5.6
Install the Application Verifier
Install your app, shortcut, whatever it is you want to make work
Run the Standard User Analyzer (SUA) from the Developer and Tester Tools menu
Step through running your app, doing whatever you do to test, then close it down and have a look at what it generates

Error 2759 – Transform version incompatible with engine

leegend — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 03:42:04 +0000

I got this error message today running an install of PGP Desktop, which I’d transformed and didn’t find a lot of information about it. On digging into it (I found some useful information in this pdf - http://www.hentzenwerke.com/samplechapters/deployfox_scappb.pdf), Wise Installer Editor 8.0 decided to stick an entry in the Summary table, Minimum Installer Version and set it to 5.0, a version that only exists on Windows 7. I can’t tell if it’s because the changes I made to the transform require Installer 5 (unlikely) or if because I ran this on Windows 7, Wise decided to set this to 5.00. Regardless, it’s not going to run on XP or Vista with this set, so I’ve changed it back to 3.00 as in this case, upgrading Windows Installer isn’t an option (v5.0 isn’t available for XP or Vista).

Use directory properties in msi

leegend — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:54:17 +0000

I came across an msi today that was using a registry key to store a ConfigDir, namely a directory where an ini file was going to. Common enough right? A neat way to reference this directory is using information that’s already in the msi, like this:

1. Find the directory you’re interested in. In Wise, you can sort the Directory table by the actual path, so I found my directory this way. As an example, let’s call it Directory1.

2. Jump into the Component table and find an instance of Directory1 (any instance will do) in the Directory column. The component column on the same row is what you’re after, let’s call it Component1.

You can now use [$Component1] to refer to your directory. There’s some more info on Real Men Don’t Click