Capturing Changes

MSI Package Builder comes with unique monitoring technology that provides you with an ability of tracking changes made to your operating system and create a project containing those changes. This feature can be used in a scope of the low-level repackaging process for creating a deployment package based on those changes. You can also use it to simply review the changes performed to the underlying operating system during the monitoring session.

To start a new monitoring session to capture the changes performed to the underlying operating system, you can press the Start Monitoring button from the Capture group on the Home Ribbon page or choose the Start Monitoring item from the Projects view pop-up menu. The wizard will appear on the screen, where you can provide a name for the project to be created on a basis of the changes monitored and choose additional processes to be filtered during the monitoring process. The monitoring modules will ignore the activity of the filtered processes, thus the changes performed by those processes will not be included into the resulting set. As soon as the monitoring is started, you can perform the changes to be monitored, thus run the applications you are going to track activity of and/or perform the changes manually.

To stop the capturing procedure, press the Stop Monitoring button from the Capture group on the Home Ribbon page or choose the Stop Monitoring item from the Projects view pop-up menu. When the monitoring process is stopped, the project with the specified name is created, containing all the changes performed to the underlying operating system while the monitoring was active. If you want to create a deployment package based on these changes, you should first prepare the created project. For detailed information on the projects preparation steps, refer to the Projects Preparation section of this document.

This feature is also used both in automated and advanced monitoring repackaging modes, but the preparation steps, as well as the MSI package creation steps, are automated. As you have now been introduced to the capturing abilities, you should be able to use those abilities in your everyday work.