New - MSI
Install for the Black Ice Printer Drivers
Black Ice software has
added a new MSI sample installation to the Black Ice
printer driver Resource Toolkit (RTK). The MSI
install for the printer driver was created using
Visual Studio .Net 2003, using the Install project
feature.
The sample MSI install
was requested by several Black Ice Software
customers who did not want to or could not use
Install Shield.
The MSI setup is a basic
(simplified) setup of the Black Ice printer driver;
it copies the driver files to the required
locations, adds the printer driver, print processor
and print monitor and finally the printer to the
system. The sample MSI install supports specifying
the printer driver settings through the printer
driver’s INI file.
Additionally, the sample
MSI setup allows developers to change the name of
the printer and of the printer driver components to
meet their specific requirements, since many Black
Ice customers need to brand the driver.
To actually install the
printer driver a “custom action” is used. The custom
action is a function call from the Install DLL (MYDLL.DLL),
included in the RTK. The function called by the MSI
installation from the Install DLL makes all of the
necessary Win32 API calls to install each printer
driver component, including the print processor,
print monitor, port, printer driver and the
printer. To simplify the install, all component
names are written to a registry key, and the Install
DLL function reads the names of the printer driver
components from that key. This way, the setup
developer can easily change the name of the
components by changing the registry key values, as
shown in the screen shot below.
When the Black Ice
printer driver is installed, the printer settings
will be read by the driver from the INI file (BiCIniNt.ini
in the case of the Black Ice Color driver). The
settings specified in the INI file will be set as
default settings for every user on the system. If a
setting is not specified in the INI file, the
printer driver will use the default values hard
coded in the driver, such as the JPEG file format
for the color driver.
Developers can create
their own MSI installation for the printer driver,
using packages other than Visual Studio, but the
sample install was written using Visual Studio .NET
since this platform is the one most readily
available to developers.
The primary benefit to
using an MSI installation is its convenience and
practicality for network wide distribution and
deployment. The main
reason to use MSI technology is to implement
software (mandatory or public) by Windows group
policies. Over all, MSI packaging is a standard
Windows installation package and provides much more
flexible options to install an application, and it
is also easier to deploy for all Microsoft Windows
based operating systems.
Maintenance subscribers
can contact the Black Ice Sales department to
request their free upgrade to the latest Black Ice
printer driver and Resource Toolkit containing the
new MSI sample installation.