C# custom action windows form focused issue

Question

Background: I used Visual Studio setup project to deploy one of C# application to client windows server. While installing the application I need to setup a scheduled task in the server as well For this I used a Custom Action feature in the setup project. What I did is created a windows form with input fields and "ok" button and once user enter values and click on the "ok" button task will be created. I added this custom task in Install and Commit steps in Custom Action.

Issue : Everything works fine but when the created windows from shows, it lost the focuses even I used showDialog method to show the form. So always main setup window will active and users not see the popup form in background (see the attached image).But I can click on the popup window and make it activate. I tried with SetActiveWindow method also but no good result so far.

Simple what I need is to activate the popup window untill user action (default showDialog behavior). So here I'm looking for any help.

Answer 1

If you want to get user input using custom UI during the MSI deployment best approach is to create the .wid extension files. this is the type of UI files that you see during the MSI installation(where you select the installation path etc). Enough though visual studio doesn't have features to create these UI files there are Microsoft tools you can use to create these files. One of the best tool is Orac.

• Orac.exe
• How to use the Orca database editor to edit Windows Installer files

Once you create the UI file, you have to place the file under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\Tools\Deployment\VsdDialogs\1033 (it's where MSI picks the default UI files from)

After that you should be able to select your custom UI and inject it during any phase of installation cycle(beforeinstall, install, afterinstall etc). Then you can pass the value user has entered into the text field as a argument for installer class. Then you can read the value within the installer class using context parameter.

string value = Context.Parameters["ParameterName"];