Custom Action Tutorial coming soon to a blog near you...

Since I didn't get any responses for suggestions for a C++ custom action, I took a look at the newsgroups and found this post where the author wants to detect if an application is running and prompt the user, close the application, etc. Developing a custom action to handle this would be a good thing for the community, as it is a fairly common request.

This also meets the bill for covering almost every aspect of a robust custom action - user interaction, running in silent mode, custom table, validation, etc. The one thing it does not implicitly have is a rollback action. I will "fake" a rollback action for demonstration purposes.

I also decided on a multi-part series as the best format for this.

• Part one - describe the specifications and set up the development environment.
• Part two - create a "Hello MSI" custom action and insert it into a sample MSI.
• Part three - debugging the "Hello MSI" custom action.
• Part four - add tables and other required entries to the MSI.
• Part five - add code to read the tables.
• Part six - add code to close the application. I'll likely gloss over this pretty fast, as killing an application is not the true focus here.
• Part seven - testing the custom action.
• Part eight - creating documentation for other developers.
• Part eight - Creating validations for the action and tables.

In the process of developing this, I will loosely cover internationalization concerns, Unicode support, MSI Custom Action fundamentals, and more. I will "try" to follow the format of MSDN documentation in the process.

My intention is to complete the series first and post one new part every couple of days to keep the writing style similar and assure completeness. With my current workload, I'd guess part one would be published in late October.

Does anyone have specific feature requests for this Custom Action? Topics not mentioned here that should be covered?