Installing SqlExpress on a customer's computer

D

David Thielen

Hi;

When a customer installs our website which uses the ASP.NET 2.0 SqlExpress
role manager, we need to have SqlExpress on their computer. However, we don't
want to include it in our installer since most will have it. So...

1) How do we tell if it is installed (so we can prompt them if it is not).

2) What url do we point them to to download it?
 
S

Steven Cheng[MSFT]

Hi Dave,

Thank you for posting.

As for the SQLExpress installation, since it is a prerequisites of your web
application setup project, I think you can consider using the VS 2005 setup
project's "Prerequisites" feature which can help add some automatic detect
and install support of some certain components(such as .net framework,
MDAC, SQLEXPRESS.... ). Actually this is done by the built-in bootstrapper
component included in the VS 2005 setup project, you can have a look at the
msdn reference on this:

#How to: Install Prerequisites in Windows Installer Deployment
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7eh4aaa5.aspx

By default, the installation option for such prerequisites are download and
install from the vendor's site(recommend), however, you can also manually
specify a location(local or remote ) which will be displayed to user during
the setup step. For your scenario, if you choos the "Sql Express" as one
of the prerequisites, when the user launch your application's setup
package, it will first check the existence of those prerequisites
components on the user's machine and if not existed, it will launch that
component's installation package according to our configuration( from
vendor site or from the msi in within our application's setup pakage or
from a custom location...)

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Community Support


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D

David Thielen

Hi;

We use WIX instead of VS setup. We use WIX instead because the VS setup has
lots of errors in it according to the WIX group at Microsoft.

So can you tell us how to:

a) Determine if Sql Express is installed (registry setting, etc.)

b) What url to send users to to download & install Sql Express
 
J

Joe Kaplan \(MVP - ADSI\)

If you are using WiX, you might consider creating a simple VS setup project
that checks for that dependency and then using dark to reverse engineer the
MSI so you can see how they are detecting the dependency. That might be the
most reliable way to determine this. Also, asking on the WiX mailing list
is probably a better bet...

Joe K.
 
S

Steven Cheng[MSFT]

Hi Dave,

As for SQL EXPRESS's download location, you can visit the Microsoft
download site and search for it. Based on research, you can consider use
the following links:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=220549b5-0b07-4448-
8848-dcc397514b41&DisplayLang=en

or

go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=56005

Regards,

Steven Cheng
Microsoft Online Community Support


==================================================

When responding to posts, please "Reply to Group" via your newsreader so
that others may learn and benefit from your issue.

==================================================


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



Get Secure! www.microsoft.com/security
(This posting is provided "AS IS", with no warranties, and confers no
rights.)
 

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