Thank you for this information. I did not know this. This is a problem. If
we ever do a service pack for Autodesk Design Review 2008, we may wish to
use MSI technology - not a patch.
wrote in message news:5564872@discussion.autodesk.com...
While I can appreciate you were busy with DR2008, please understand this
inconsistency in delivery formats makes supporting your software a nightmare
for IT departments.
Autodesk seem to be swaying towards MSI support for products, which is great
as it means we can easily deploy them to multiple computers. However if you
are going to support this format, please make a commitment to it, have
someone research how it works in a group policy environment, and ensure all
patches use the same installation techniques.
One particular problem this mixing and matching can cause which you may not
be aware of is that any MSI deployed using group policy is protected by the
windows file protection system. This means that if a user attempts to
uninstall a program, or a virus infects it, windows detects that and
automatically repairs the program using the MSI.
In fact, I've just tested your service pack on a machine where DWF viewer 7
has been installed using group policy, and the service pack .EXE file does
nothing. Oh, it installs ok, but as soon as you attempt to run the program,
the 'corrupted' files get replaced with the standard ones from the MSI and
we're straight back at the original unpatched version.