I am building an MSI to install our company's product with InstallShield 2010, and it needs to apply several Windows hotfixes in the installation that the product needs to run.
I was wondering what's the way to accomplish this using InstallShield? Using prerequisites?
It took me a while to understand how to even define a new prerequisite, and they seem to be pretty limited in the conditions they provide to check if my hotfix is already installed, and what's the exact Windows version I'm running on. Moreover I would need to define a prerequisite for each version of Windows and each architecture which creates a massive bloat of prerequisites.
Until now we used python scripts that the MSI would run just before termination that would apply these hotfixes, but as of Windows Server 2008 this is no longer possible, and the installation of the hotfixes fail.
I remember I saw sometime an installation of some enterprise product (SQL Server or Oracle) that applied Windows hotfixes in its installation process, and it seemed a pretty standard procedure. I was wondering if there is a convention to how it can be done?
You'll need to do this with prerequisites, so that the Installshield bootstrapper EXE installs the hotfixes before launching your MSI. (multiple MSI's can't run simultaneously, and chances are these hotfixes contain an MSI)