You want to create a custom OS? Don’t do it!
More than one and a half year ago I have been working on a project — I used to call these kind of hackjobs “Custom OS”, but that term doesn’t fit very well if you ask me (actually it was a OS customization) — called Codename Sylvester. A few days ago I stumbled over a 3GB zip file containing all […]
Tags: Codename Sylvester, Custom OS, Microsoft, Windows, XP, (...) | read on
A few batch files for creating Windows 7 setup images
With the recent leaks of Windows 7 there have been several builds which did not come on an ISO file, but have been leaked as a VHD file or an archive instead. I have created a few batch files which make it easy to convert a VHD image to an ISO file and to recreate authentic setup discs of Windows […]
Tags: 7, Batch file, CREATEISO, Disk2vhd, ISO file, Microsoft, Setup disc, Setup image, VHD file, VHD image, VHD2WIM, (...) | read on
Visual Studio / .NET build numbers explained
Maybe you have been wondering why the build numbers of Visual Studio and .NET are always so high, for example 10.0.20506.01 for the recent Visual Studio 2010 beta. The reason for this is the format of the build number — it’s not an incrementing number as for Windows builds — the format of Visual Studio build numbers is YMMDD.NN. Y: […]
Tags: .NET, Beta, Build number, Community Technoloy Preview, Compile, CTP, Development, Microsoft, RC, Recompile, Release Candidate, (...) | read on
Parser
Maybe you have seen one of those old Microsoft DOS and Windows 3.x setup information files already (usually named setup.inf). Most of the software back then was distributed on floppy disks and the setup.inf file has been used to advise the setup program which file is located on which floppy disk. Many of the old operating systems available at MSDN […]
Tags: DOS, Floppy disk, Microsoft, MS-DOS, MSDN, Parser, Setup information file, setup.inf, Windows, (...) | read on
How to extract msu/msp/msi/exe files from the command line
I find these commands quite helpful — maybe you know them already — if not, here you go: Microsoft Hotfix Installer (.exe) setup.exe /t:C:<target_dir> /c Microsoft Update Standalone Package (.msu) expand -F:* update.msu C:<target_dir> cd <target_dir> expand -F:* update.cab C:<target_dir> Microsoft Patch File (.msp) msix patch.msp /out C:<target_dir> msix.zip Windows Installer Package (.msi) msiexec /a setup.msi /qb TARGETDIR=C:<target_dir>
Tags: cab, Command line, exe, Extract, Microsoft, Microsoft Hotfix Installer, Microsoft Patch File, Microsoft Update Standalone Package, msi, msix, msp, (...) | read on
