InstallShield Woes

We used an ancient very of InstallShield for the longest time to manage our software installs. Just this year we upgraded to the latest version of InstallShield. Of course we had to rewrite our projects from scratch. In retrospect, the upgrade may not have been such a wise decision. Our customer requires "silent" installs. They cannot require any user input as the updates are pushed out to users over the network.

Installshield has the functionality to deal with silent installs. You create a response file to generate answers to the questions that are normally posed to the user. A developer has been recording his actions to generate this response file. However he has discovered that whenever he makes a change to the InstallShield project, the response files become invalidated. He need to go back and recreate the response files.

The developer in charge of this is tearing his hair out because of this. I joked that we might need to create a program that automatically regenerates the response file every time the InstallShield project is touched. Feels like two levels of indirection.

My developer colleague thinks that the InstallShield objects have a unique GUID that is regnerated every time you mess with the project. He further believes that the response file data is tied to a specific GUID. If that is the case, this is indeed pure insanity.