Coworker started getting the above message in the event log and as dialog during install. Argument [2] was File and argument [3] was a specific file. Error dialog read Product: (app name) -- The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2602. Package was a ......

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Okay, things get stranger.

In the case where the package isn't found on the local cache... it's actually there, it's identical to the original package, permissions are set correctly, but yet the Installer engine doesn't recognize it... still troubleshooting.

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We're removing WINS from our environment. Don't ask me why, I'm not a big fan of the idea... but they don't pay me to make decisions, they pay me to make things work. Things work fine without WINS, once you've joined the domain, DNS takes it all over and everything works. However, we have a utility that does most of those tasks needed to join a machine ......

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Even though I'm no longer involved with group policy, I'm still the go-to guy for issues. Got a call this morning from a helpdesk guy who was working an issue with Add New Programs not populating. He'd dug through RSOP and found that two apps had failed to remove. (More specifically, RSOP showed the yellow bang on User Configuration/Software Settings/Software ......

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The Powers That Be have decreed that the work I've been doing with group policy will be transitioned to another group, so I won't be involved with that anymore. Since I won't have any things I've found with GP anymore, I guess future posts will involve my other two roles: application packaging and being the junior coder... along with those things I ......

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Okay, it's not new; but it's new to me.  It's the Microsoft Windows Group Policy Guide.  I'm not sure why I didn't pick this up sooner; it's got some useful knowledge for group policy in it (go figure).

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I was asked earlier today to come up with a list of what GPOs applied to a given box. Simple enough given the code from one of the previous posts to ask AD what GPOs apply to the machine's OU, but I'm not convinced there's more to it than that. Senior coder had started going through GetGPOList(), FreeGPOList(), and GetAppliedGPOList() but they didn't ......

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We got an error yesterday that I'd not seen before, when publishing two separate packages. Both of them were created by Visual Studio 2008 instead of our typical Wise/InstallShield packages. The error was "No package in the software installation data in the Active Directory meets this criteria.". A web search found nothing useful on this error; I'd ......

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I've had this post rattling around in my head for a few months now, but I've never had enough hard data to really flesh it out as well as I'd liked. I still don't, but I need to get this down on paper. Apps deployed via Group Policy expire from the local cache. This can be a problem if the app is removed from the servers, or if you make changes to an ......

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Back to the basic apps I started with. There were a couple of locations where the output was "System.Byte[]" or "System.Object[]". System.Object[] appears to happen in "msifilelist", and only on those apps that have a transform. Given that you're loading everything into a DataRow, code like this will separate out the transform if one exists: foreach ......

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We came across an issue where Robocopy was thinking that many files on a given server had been modified from the version that was on a different server. Not a big deal, except "changed files" = "files that need to be copied out", and there were a lot of files that would have been copied over slow links to distant servers. The wierd thing - some folks ......

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This one is more for my benefit than for yours... the base question for this one is a question that I've been asked more than once at work, and even more than once by the same person. I figure if I write it out, perhaps I'll be able to explain it better. Okay - first, the players. Two domains. Let's call them DomA and DomB. Two users. We can call them ......

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Okay, this may be old hat to some of you, but it took me some time to figure it out and I didn't find much useful when searching. Came across a need to delete a 64 bit registry value from a 32 bit app. The standard registry delete functions would end up deleting it from the Wow6432Node, which was what was not the desired outcome. The code to make it ......

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Ok, part of all this we've already talked about requires that you have the policy's GUID. But how do you get it? Simple enough: private string Query(string Criteria, string Attribute) { DirectorySearcher mySearcher = new DirectorySearcher(new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://DC=D... null, null, AuthenticationTypes.Secure )); mySearcher.ClientTimeout ......

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I found my more detailed notes on the package flags. A couple of corrections: The flag “524288” specifically tells whether an app is published or assigned – it’s set for assigned, unset for published. 8 is typically set for published apps and cleared for assigned. I promised code. private void SearchAD(string target, string policy, string policyname) ......

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