One month on: what's your impression about 11.5?

[Hamilton-Scott]

I've installed 11.5 and registered it. Thankfully I only converted one sample project and when I built the release it threw up some file name errors which are fine at 10.5 and 11.0. I'm not too spooked about it as the sample project was a hack of many edits but I'm concerned about it nonetheless. I'm a bit reluctant to want to migrate my production projects to 11.5 at this time.

Has anyone had a train smash converting projects to 11.5 and building releases? Sooner or later we will have to when we migrate from 2003 to 2005 .Net and I'd like to know if there are any serious red flags?

[pctaylor]

All I've done so far is install 11.5.

I'll let you know though- I'll be converting a pretty large project in the next week or so. We don't have an option as we've migrated to .NET 2.0, so i'm going to have to work through any problems.

[Jonny_B]

I've converted all of my 11 projects to 11.5 - No problems so far, infact many issues I was having with 11 were fixed in 11.5 (the main reason for switching over for me)

[soorajganga]

Okie...
But how about an upgradation from InstallShield 7 to 11.5? Do you people see any major risk in it, as the gap is too large?
Experts, any thoughts..?

[Jonny_B]

you could always convert it. Installshield automatically backs up a copy for you, so you could try it out and if it doesn't work then you could go back to the previous version. Since you could get a free evaluation of 11.5, it won't really cost you anything anyways.

[soorajganga]

Yup!
I already started working on it with an evaluation copy of 11.5. It allows me to build and use my existing project. I am worried about the other hidden issues which MAY pop some time after I purchased 11.5 and when I am on the middle of the road!!!

[Jonny_B]

I guess that you will probably want to use as much of the evaluation as you can. As we all know, there are always issues that will come up regardless of whether you started with installshield 7 or 11.5, those are inevitable. Personally, I would prefer to be using the newer technology.

[sturge]

I moved up from Dev 8 no problem. I only get a warning from a custom action in a merge module but I'm able to just ignore it.

[rquesada]

Hi,
I've just migrated a complex project from IS v7.04 to IS 11.5. So far, the only problems I've found were in some merge modules (I had to remove the a msvc60 merge modules because it was conflicting with another mergemodule related to msvc60, so I don't know how I will fix this).

So far, so good, the migration went ok.

riq.

[rquesada]

I've just found that the "Environment variables" got lost in the conversion from IS 7.04 and IS 11.5.

riq.

[rquesada]

another minor minor feature that changed, was the log output of the StandAlone builder. In IS 7.04 the stand alone builder was shipped with the product.

Why it does care ? because, if you are need to parse the output to find the errors, now you have to update your regular expressions.

But, as I said, this is a minor, minor feature.

[soorajganga]

What about the _IsUser.dll?

My fresh 11.5 project doesnt have a _IsUser.dll anywhere ( I am not very sure :p )
But the migrated project has a _IsUser.dll. And the changes that I made to the string table inside the IDE are not getting detected by the script. ( I was trying to create a new string which was not there in my 7.5 project and trying to get the value of the same. But it gives me a compiler error saying that the identifier is not declared)....Whats going wrong?

Experts!!!!

[MarcusM]

That's interesting. I encountered a similar problem while converting some projects from IS 9 to 11 but in my case no string table entry was compiled into the setup althoug all entries were visible, changes on existing entries and new entries were saved. They somehow just didn't make it into the compiled setup.
So this issue seems to be still existant.

[soorajganga]

So...is that a bug...?
But I have not seen it in any of the 'known-issues' list!
Can somebody from macrovision pls comment on this.

[Jennifer]

I've converted my huge project (3000 files and numerous custom actions and merge modules) to 11.5 and no hitches. So far so good but I haven't executed a full test against the installation yet. I've always upgraded my projects within a few months of a new IS release so maybe that's why I had not problems with project upgrades?

[MarcusM]

I don't know under which condition this happens. I posted my problem here: http://community.installshield.com/showthread.php?t=150801 but got no replies. It was then faster to build the project new and copy everything over. That also took me quite a while but the project now works. soorajganga is the first who's written about a similar problem.
Another thread that might help you, soorajganga, is here:
http://community.installshield.com/showthread.php?t=152088
But a final solution hasn't been posted there either only some thoughts as to where the failure might originate.

[Hamilton-Scott]

I ran into a snafu with the 11.5 standalone build and how its use yielded stange InstallUtilLib.dll "unknown error" messages when I tried running my installation after building it. I never had these with version 11.0, hence I had to rollback to 11.0.

Point I'm getting at is that I raised a support call giving all the logs and code samples to InstallShield. The engineer I dealt with, Mike Bertermann (sp?) was as helpful as usual and I think my problem has been passed on to the developers for inspection. It might be my problem after all. I've not done much with 11.5 as yet but if it is like the 10.5 and 11.0 before it, then the quality of support I get at 11.5 is as good and thorough as the previous versions. :)

[soorajganga]

So you are suggesting us to go ahead with the 11.5 and ignore this IsUser.dll issue? I dont think it will be nice to report the problem and wait for the developers to solve it at their end as this is not specific to a single customer. This issue should have been fixed by now. How can we report this to Macrovision, incase if they are not aware of this till now?

[MarkoK]

I'm in the process of evaluating IS 11.5 now. We use IS 7 Prof. currently.

I made the following experiences until now:
Migration of our largest IS7 project took more than 2 hours
The IDE is crashing when you invoke the Release Wizard and change the media settings to include only those components which you check in the list below.
We use our own script libraries (.obl files) cause we ran into IS7 compiler limits with our scripts - I had to reconstruct those libs with IS 11.5 to avoid linker errors.
You cannot drag and drop whole folders to a static file link in a component - this is a k.o. criteria if you install 3rd party software like java jre/python with thousands of files

[MarkoK]

Discovered a new bug:

We make use of the feature "required feature". Everytime I click the 3-dotted ellipse to get the dialog, memory usage increases about 120mb. And this is not freed when I close the dialog. So I will ask my IT department to get me an additional 1GB of RAM :(