I am trying to integrate our application with the MSDE 2000 SP3 and use the
MSI based installation with merge files. This sounds great in theory, but it
doesn't work at all. I thought it was due to my lack of MSI knowledge, but
looking at http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/bugs_msi.htm and the various
KB-articles about MSDE setup proves different. MS is aware of these problems
and discourages the use of merge modules (quote from the SP3a readme: "The
Setup utilities for new applications should be written to call the MSDE 2000
Setup utility instead of directly consuming the MSDE 2000 merge modules.").
I have fixed a lot of bugs, but there is still one that keeps me from
getting it to work ("Error 1157 loading library sqlcax.dll" that is). I
stopped putting more effort in the installation procedure, but I cannot
distribute my application this way.

MSI is quite difficult to manage and without tooling, such as Wise it was
nearly impossible to create a working script. But it seems that Microsoft
doesn't understand MSI themselves, because in SP3a there are still problems
(I even get the idea that it is getting worse each service pack). Does this
mean that MS discourages the use of MSI completely? I am pretty disappointed
in MS about this installation method. MSDE installation is praised in MS
articles about MSDE (integrated installation using merge modules), but it is
discouraged when you actually want to use it. Does MS intend to fix these
problems by releasing a new set of merge modules? If Microsoft creates a
setup using Wise that installs MSDE it can find out easily what is going
wrong (I am willing to prepare such a script if that is useful). My logfile
can be viewed at http://home.ict.nl/~ramklein/MSI-output.txt for further
reference.

I would love to hear someone from MS to comment on these problems...

Hi Ramon,

The noises I'm hearing suggest a simpler non-merge-module-based install for
future versions. I hope that's the case.

Regards,

--
Greg Low (MVP)
MSDE Manager SQL Tools
www.whitebearconsulting.com

"Ramon de Klein" <RamonDeKlein (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

Hi Ramon,

I do understand your situation and how frustrating it is for you. I have
also seen a lot of issues using merge modules.

Regarding releasing a new set of Merge Modules, currently I do not have
much information on this for the next major release but we do discourage
customers from using Merge modules at this time due to the known issues.


This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Regards,

Bill Cheng
Microsoft Support Engineer
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