Itty Bitty Rants

Infrequent posts about stuff.

Installations in Windows 8

If you follow my Twitter stream you’ll have noticed that I’ve been playing with the Developer Preview of Windows 8 this morning. I’ve gotten a couple of funny looks from the family but to me a new operating system to play with and especially one with as many interesting changes as Windows 8 is pretty exciting.

As an installation developer though I figured I’d take a quick peek at things and see what was going on at this stage. The short version is: Quite a lot and very little.

The big news for setup developers is the introduction of an entirely new distribution model for the Metro Style applications using an AppX package which according to the documentation is “An app package is a container based on the Open Packing Conventions (OPC) standard.”. So pretty much it’s a zip file with some structured content. There is API access to the installation system but for the most part as far as installation development goes for Metro Style apps: A person with my specialized skills is not needed. Honestly, that’s pretty much a good thing.

Of course this being a Microsoft product it does provide backward compatibility for older technologies and so I was unsurprised to see only a minor increment to the version of Windows Installer in this build to 5.0.8102.0 and continued to be unsurprised by the log output from a test installer I threw together to check for any non-obvious operational changes.

For your perusal:

For completeness sake I also ran a couple of classic InstallScript installers and everything ran fine there as well and the log output from those didn’t have any surprises.