[wix-users] Burn Protocol for ExePackage Usage

[Edwin Castro]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Phill Hogland <phill.hogland at rimage.com> wrote:
> Also typically (with exceptions) services do not have windows message pumps or use windows messages which I do not believe allowed to cross Desktop boundaries.  However a typical Burn based bundle has a bootstrapper application which uses windows messages.  When Burn spans a child process CreateProcess is used (rather than CreateProcessAsUser with a WinStation/Desktop defined to the launching process's WinStation\Desktop, as a service would be implemented).  With CreateProcess the child process ends up in a different WinStation\Desktop than the launching process and windows messages appear to hang.  So I suspect launching a bundle under the NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM  context,  may work in some situations with a careful bundle design, but in general there are many reasons why it may also 'hang' and not work.


I think this is spot on.

Yesterday I found a cached page on bing to a connect issue (I can't
access the page or it was deleted or something) where someone reported
the same issue I'm seeing but for vcredist_x86.exe for Visual Studio
2013.

http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=vcredist_x86.exe+hangs+%22Windows+Server+2008%22&d=4705331440193611&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=l958eCobVL5bvN_6GzGAic6JDHPA3beP

Using psexec -s -i allows me to install vcredist_x86.exe successfully
on Windows Server 2008.

I'd like to point out that vcredist_x86.exe (for Visual Studio 2012)
will install through our configuration management tool successfully on
Window 7 and later so it appears that something changed in the
operating system between Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 and
Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 that allows the same package to
work in the later operating systems.

I'm now evaluating whether one of the strategies mentioned in

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/winsdk/archive/2009/07/14/launching-an-interactive-process-from-windows-service-in-windows-vista-and-later.aspx

might help me get over the hump.

-- 
Edwin G. Castro