Category: News – Visual Installer

Since January 1, 2016, Windows 7 and newer Windows will no longer trust software that is signed with a SHA-1 code signing certificate, if the software is downloaded from the Internet and the software is time-stamped with a value greater than January 1, 2016. This means that if you code sign a binary file (for example an EXE file) this year and uses SHA-1 as a hash algorithm, it will not be trusted in newer Windows. Instead you must use a SHA-2 (SHA-256) code signing certificate; then the binary file will be trusted by Windows 7 and newer. You can read more about this in the following articles on Microsoft’s website:

> Windows Enforcement of Authenticode Code Signing and Timestamping
> Deprecation of SHA-1 Hashing Algorithm for Microsoft Root Certificate Program

Updated Visual Installer
We have updated our installation tool Visual Installer to support SHA-2 (SHA-256) when it code signs a setup package. We have also updated Visual Installer to support dual signing, so you can code sign a setup package with both SHA-1 and SHA-2. This is very useful if you have software that should be able to run also in older Windows (for example in Windows XP). By code signing a setup package twice, first with SHA-1 and then with SHA-2, your code sign certificate will be useful in both older Windows and newer Windows.

How to change hash algorithm from SHA-1 to SHA-2
In Visual Installer you can change the hash algorithm from SHA-1 to SHA-2, for an existing project, by following the steps below:

1. Start Visual Installer
2. Open your project
3. Choose the Special – Setup options menu item
4. Open the Code Signing tab in the Setup options dialog box
5. Open the Option sub tab
6. Select the Use SHA-2 option

7. Close the dialog box

If your minimum system requirements is Windows 7, you can use SHA-2 as a hash algorithm. But if you also want to support older Windows, follow the steps below:

How to dual sign a setup package (SHA-1 and SHA-2)
1. Start Visual Installer
2. Open your project
3. Choose the Special – Setup options menu item
4. Open the Code Signing tab in the Setup options dialog box
5. Open the Option sub tab
6. Select the Use SHA-1 and SHA-2 (recommended) option

7. Close the dialog box

When you open your project file
If you have installed the latest version of Visual Installer 2015 (version 10.5.16 or later) and opens a project file, you may see this message box when you open your project:

It is recommended to answer yes, so the latest version of Microsoft’s code signing tool is used when a setup package is code signed. If you want to dual sign a setup package, you must have a quite new version of the code signing tool. You can read more in this blog post.

Available in Visual Installer 2015 version 10.5.16 and later
The functionality described above is available in Visual Installer 2015 version 10.5.16 and later; in both the Standard and Professional versions of Visual Installer. If you have an active 1 or 12 months maintenance plan for Visual Installer 2015, you can download this update for free from our download page.

See also
> What is SHA-1 and SHA-2 and what’s the difference between them?
> How to code sign a setup package (Visual Installer tip)

We have improved Visual Installer’s behaviour in situations where a required version of Microsoft .NET Framework is missing in a computer. Before you could choose between stop the installation or warn the user if a specific version of .NET Framework was missing in the end-user´s computer. But now you can also let the end-user download the missing version of .NET Framework from the Internet and install it. Or, if you distribute .NET Framework with your software, you can start an installation of Microsoft .NET Framework directly from Visual Installer.

This was partially possible already in earlier versions of Visual Installer / Professional using script commands, but now this can be done without script. You can choose if you want this behaviour by selecting an option in Visual Installer’s editor.

How it works
If Visual Installer discovers during the installation of your software that the required version of Microsoft .NET Framework is missing, a mini wizard is started. The mini wizard will help the end-user to start an installation of .NET Framework. Visual Installer pauses the installation until .NET Framework is installed. The pictures below show an example of how it may look like:

Step 1 – Initial information

Step 2 – Download information

Step 3 – Information about how to continue

Where to find this new functionality?
You can turn on and off this new functionality by opening the Special – Setup options menu item and opening the .NET tab:

In the .NET tab you will find a new option named Download and install .NET Framework. If you select this option, the new behaviour will be invoked if the required version of .NET is missing in the end-user’s computer. If you click on the Options button, you can set some options for this new function. You can for example specify your own download page if you don’t want to use the default download page at Microsoft’s website. You can also specify a language for the download page.

See also
> Visual Installer: More available versions of .NET Framework
> Tip: How to prevent an installation if wrong .NET version

We have increased the list of available versions of .NET Framework in Visual Installer to also include sub versions of .NET Framework, for example version 4.5.1, 4.5.2 etc. The picture below shows which versions of .NET Framework that Visual Installer currently supports:

Also the scripting language in Visual Installer have been extended to support the above versions.

You can use this functionality, for example, to install a missing version of .NET Framework or to run different tools depending of which versions of .NET Framework that are installed.

Available in Visual Installer 2015 version 10.5.15 and later
The extended list of supported .NET versions is available in Visual Installer 2015 version 10.5.15 and later. If you have an active 1 or 12 months maintenance plan for Visual Installer 2015, you can download this update for free from our download page.

See also
> Visual Installer: If a specific version of .NET Framework is missing

We have added a new setup dialog box to the Professional version of Visual Installer. The name of the dialog box is User Options and it is a general dialog box where the user can select and unselect options that you add to the setup project. These options co-operates with conditional statements in Visual Installer’s scripting language and with Visual Installer’s Registry tab. Below is an example of how the User Options setup dialog box may look like and how it can be used:

In the example above we have added three options to the setup dialog box. The user can select and unselect the options of his/her choice.

To activate this dialog box, you need first open the Dialog boxes tab in Visual Installer’s editor and check the User options option:

Then you can click on the button marked “…” to the right of the option. This will open a new dialog box in the Visual Installer editor with the title User Options. Below we have filled the dialog box with the text and options that is needed to create the setup dialog box in the example above:

As you see, it is very easy to create a setup dialog box with your own options. You just need to enter a title, a short description text and your options. And it is done!

Co-operates with Visual Installer’s scripting language and ‘Registry’ tab
The main purpose of this new option dialog box is to let the end-user decide which script lines to execute and which keys and values to add to the Registry, during the setup process. This is a more flexible way to handle user choices than file components (file groups) because you don’t necessary need to copy files based on user choices; instead you can use Visual Installer’s whole scripting language to do whatever you want. This is useful if some special operations must be done, based on user choices.

Below we show how Visual Installer’s scripting language can co-operate with the User Options dialog box:

And below we show how the Registry tab in Visual Installer can co-operate with the User Options dialog box:

Scripting language
In Visual Installer’s scripting language we have added a new condition check, IF OPTION(n), that can be used to check which options the user has selected in the User Options setup dialog box. We have added a similar condition check to Visual Installer’s Registry tab: IF_OPTION(n).

The IF OPTION(n) condition in the script language can check both if an option is ON (selected) or OFF (unselected). So for example to examine if option 2 was selected by the end-user, you can enter the following condition:

IF OPTION(2)=ON
…
END IF

If you for example need to examine if option 3 was not selected, you can enter the following condition:

IF OPTION(3)=OFF
…
END IF

‘Registry’ tab
The condition check in the Registry tab works in a similar way. IF_OPTION(n) or IF_OPTION(n)=ON can be used to examine if an option was selected by the end-user. IF_OPTION(n)=OFF can be used to check if an option was not selected.

If you use IF_OPTION(n) and the option number n was selected by the end-user, the key or value will be added to the registry. The example below shows how to examine if option number 1 is selected, and if yes, add a value to registry:

See also
> Tip: How to use the ‘User Options’ dialog box with script

We have updated Visual Installer’s built-in scripting language so it now supports an ELSE statement. This will help creating simpler scripts in some situations.

For example, assume that you want to run a particular and specialized application or setup program in a specific version of Windows, and a general application or setup program in all other versions of Windows. Before you needed to cover all Windows version with IF statements and OS checks, but now you only need to check for one OS, and add an ELSE statement to cover the rest. Example:

In this blog post we explained how to use Windows’ environment variables in Visual Installer; for example as a part of a file path. You can also create or change values for environment variables in the system during an installation by using a script command in Visual Installer’s scripting language. The name of the command is SETENV and you can use this command to set an environment variable to a specific value. If the environment variable does not exists, it will be created. If it already exists, its value will be updated.

Examples of usage
The example below shows how to use the SETENV command to set an environment variable with the variable name MyVariable to the value MyValue:

// Example 1: Set MyVariable = MyValue
SETENV MyVariable, MyValue

You can also use Visual Installer’s variables (for example %DESTDIR) when you set values. The example below shows how to set an environment variable with the variable name MyAppsFolder to the path %DESTDIR\MyApps:

// Example 2: Set MyAppsFolder = %DESTDIR\MyApps
SETENV MyAppsFolder, %DESTDIR\MyApps

The picture below shows same examples in Visual Installer’s scripting editor:

It is possible to use Windows environment variables in Visual Installer. The environment variables can be used in the Registry tab and in the INI files tab in Visual Installer. You can find a list of supported environment variables in this Wikipedia page (see the Windows section).

You use an environment variable in the same way as a Visual Installer variable. For example, to include the %ProgramFiles% environment variable in a file path you can include it like this:

%ProgramFiles%\SamLogic\Visual Installer

And during the installation the %ProgramFiles% variable will be replaced with the current value that the system returns (usually C:\Program Files (x86)).

The picture below shows how to use the %COMPUTERNAME% environment variable in the Registry tab in Visual Installer:

During the installation the %COMPUTERNAME% variable will be replaced with the current computer name of the computer.

See also
> With the SETENV command you can set environment variables from Visual Installer