msi limitation - 1600 components per feature

msi has the follwoing limitation: 1600 components per feature:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa368579(VS.85).aspx

But why?

http://www.appdeploy.com/messageboards/printable.asp?m=20038

http://blogs.msdn.com/icumove/archive/2009/05/31/right-corner-wix-heat-left-corner-thousands-of-files.aspx

Useful links for WIX UI.

WIX provides you with sets of built-in UI dialogs. To add a dialog set, add the reference the WixUIExtension:

light Product.wixobj -out Product.msi -ext WixUIExtension 

Built-in dialog sets in WIX Tutorial

But what if I need to customize my installation?

The following articles could be usefult to understand how to customize installation dialogs:

Wix Tutorial - Lesson 8

Extending UI

Windows Installer - User Interface Reference

Will try to consolidate all this information into the one article.

Installation process

Excellent article: How Windows Installer installs msi

When we launch Windows Installer engine (by running msiexec.exe) we are launching the client process. Client process will launch the Windows service process.

Log investigation is always helpfull. Read about logs here. The article contains link to a document where log file is explained in more details. Here the link for the document (Annotated_Windows_Installer_Log)

Upd:

one more article about installation phases

how to read Windows Installer Verbose log article

custom actions article

SharePoint maximum upload size on W2k8

On a Windows Server 2008 computer that has IIS 7.0-only installations, you add the maxAllowedContentLength value. When you are running Windows SharePoint Services on a Windows Server 2008-based computer that has IIS 7.0, you find that you cannot upload files that are larger than 28 MB even though you have configured the large file upload settings. Usually, the error that users see is "The page cannot be displayed." In some circumstances, users may also see an "HTTP 404" error.

To work around this problem refer the following artcile

SharePoint administrators comparision

What the Farm admin can do and what cannot?

The following articles describe differences between SP admins:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288186.aspx

SharePoint group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Farm Administrators	Yes	Perform administrative tasks in Central Administration Take ownership of any content site.	Administer individual sites or site content unless they take ownership of the site.

Group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Administrators	Yes. Windows group that exists by default; not a SharePoint group.	Install products. Create new Web applications and new Internet Information Services (IIS) Web sites. Start services. Deploy Web Parts and new features to the global assembly cache. Perform all farm-level tasks in Central Administration (provided that the Central Administration site is located on the local computer). Run the Stsadm command-line tool.  Note: Being a server-level administrator is a pre-requisite of running the Stsadm command-line tool. Depending on which command you actually run, you might need additional permissions. For example, if you run stsadm.exe –o deleteweb, the command requires that the account have write access to the content database that contains the Web application.	Administer individual sites or site content. Administer databases.

SharePoint group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Site collection administrator	Yes	Perform all administration tasks for sites within the site collection.	Access the Central Administration site.

SharePoint group	Does role exist by default?	Can do this	Cannot do this
Site nameOwners	Yes	Perform administration for the site only, not the entire site collection. Perform administrative tasks for documents, lists, and libraries.	Access the Central Administration site. Perform site collection administration tasks, such as restoring items from the second-stage Recycle Bin and managing the site hierarchy.

Upload google app via proxy

I receive the following error when try to upload application to google app engine:

urllib2.URLError: urlopen error (10061, 'Connection refused')

Proxy server prevents me from uploading the application. To workaround this I've used the following solution:

set HTTP_PROXY=http://cache.mycompany.com:3128

set HTTPS_PROXY=http://cache.mycompany.com:3128

appcfg.py update myapp

from here

But now I get another issue.

Documentation says:

You cannot specify the password as a command line option.

But it my case I need to specify the password to run the application update from batch file without input it in command line. When I use the "passin" option I get the following error:

EOFError: EOF when reading a line

There is article which describes how to modify appcfg.py file to add the password option

Update:

another solution is:

invoke the python executable followed by the script name

python "C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\appcfg.py" --passin --email=[email] update [app_folder]

OR

echo [password] | python "C:\Program Files\Google\google_appengine\appcfg.py" --passin --email=[email] update [app_folder]