izfree Tools for Windows Installer / News: Recent posts

As izfree transitions to a .NET/C# application, an interop layer was needed to call the MSI functions. This interop layer may be useful for other .NET based programs that manipulate MSI files and has been released separately under the LGPL. At the moment, there is no documentation and its only been tested to the extent that IzFree uses it, but it should still be useful.

At this time, the source base to izfree is migrating from HTML/VBScript to C#/.NET. This includes a managed wrapper around the MSI API under a separate LGPL license.

Version 1.1 of izfree is nearing completion. The COM registry extraction code is checked in and tested from a simple VBScript. Thanks to several chapters of "ATL Internals", by Brent Rector and Chris Sells, I've finally grokked how to expose COM collections and COM enumerators on STL containers. This was very handy for the izMonitor program that extracts the COM registration information for reporting back to izfree. Code to extract file version numbers has also been checked into CVS. Now I'm just putting the final touches on the izfree tool that inserts the COM registration information into the database. Once this is finished and tested, version 1.1 will be released.

A preview of the upcoming release, version 1.1, has been added to the izfree home page. New features are described with screen shots.

The izfree home page has two new tutorials. Thes tutorials show how to extend the shell's context menu and how to register a COM object by hand.

The alpha test release of izfree 1.0 has been released.

Welcome to "izfree", free tools for Microsoft Windows Installer. This project is in the process of being configured for open source team development. The code at http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/installer/ ("msidb") is the starting point for this project and it will be migrated here, with the new project name, soon. Originally the tools were called "msidb", but there is a tool included with the MSI SDK by the same name, so once the code is migrated to sourceforge, it will all be under the name "izfree".