It seems that every time I work on a project I get near the end and have to deal with actual deployment of the application and things go south.  Let's face it, Microsoft's wceload application sucks - and that's being generous. It's limited, it's got no object model, and it's behavior has changed over time without any of those changes being documented.

In a recent project I was trying to silently install an application to a directory that would change depending on the target hardware becasue different devices have their storage media named differently.  I wanted to do this without changing or having multiple CAB files, since the application was no different. Achieving this with wceload, I am convinced, is utterly impossible so I put on my reverse-engineering hat, downloaded the CAB spec (cabfmt.doc), and went to work.  Now, a few month later, and with the help of Alex Feinman, we've created a new product called the Windows CE CAB Installer SDK.  In addition to a new product, we went with a new pricing model as well.

The SDK comes with full source,  unit and integration tests designed for running under mstest, samples for generating compressed and uncompressed CAB (the SDK supports both), a template for creating custom installer DLLs and both VB and C# examples of using the SDK.

The main workhorse of the SDK is the WinCEInstallerFIle class, which looks like this:

An example of a custom installer looks like this (just to give you a flavor of how it works):

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.Text;
using OpenNETCF.Compression.CAB;

namespace System.Runtime.CompilerServices
{
  public class ExtensionAttribute : Attribute
  {
  }
}

namespace ONCFInstall
{
  public delegate void FileProgressHandler(int progressPercent);

  public static class Extensions
  {
    public static string Find(this List list, string findString)
    {
      foreach (string file in list)
      {
        if (string.Compare(file, findString, true) == 0)
        {
          return file;
        }
      }
      return null;
    }
  }

  public class CustomCABInstaller : WinCEInstallerFile
  {
    private int m_fileCount = 0;
    private CommandLineArgs m_args;

    public event FileProgressHandler FileProgress;

    public CustomCABInstaller(string cabFileName, CommandLineArgs args)
      : base(cabFileName)
    {
      m_args = args;
      SkipFileNames = m_args.SkipFiles ?? new List();
      PathStringReplacements = m_args.PathStringReplacements ?? new Dictionary();
      SkipOSVersionCheck = m_args.SkipOSVersionCheck;
    }

    /// 

    /// List of file names to skip during installation
    /// 
    public List SkipFileNames { get; set; }

    /// 

    /// List of path replacement strings
    /// 
    public Dictionary PathStringReplacements { get; set; }

    /// 

    /// If true, the installer will not check to ensure the target meets the installer's version requirements
    /// 
    public bool SkipOSVersionCheck { get; set; }

    public override void OnInstallBegin()
    {
      m_fileCount = 0;
    }

    public override void OnTargetOSVersionCheck()
    {
      // check to see if we should skip the OS version check
      if (!SkipOSVersionCheck)
      {
        base.OnTargetOSVersionCheck();
      }
    }

    public override void OnInstallFile(ref FileInstallInfo fileInfo, out bool skipped)
    {
      // check to see if it's a name we should skip
      if (SkipFileNames.Find(fileInfo.FileName) != null)
      {
        Utility.Output(string.Format("Skipping file '{0}'", fileInfo.FileName));
        skipped = true;
        return;
      }

      // do any path replacements
      foreach (KeyValuePair val in PathStringReplacements)
      {
        fileInfo.DestinationFolder = fileInfo.DestinationFolder.Replace(val.Key, val.Value);
      }

      Utility.Output(string.Format("Installing '{0}' to '{1}'", fileInfo.FileName, fileInfo.DestinationFolder));

      base.OnInstallFile(ref fileInfo, out skipped);

      if (FileProgress != null)
      {
        FileProgress((++m_fileCount * 100) / FileCount);
      }
    }
  }
}