Program Interface Overview

EMCO MSI Package Builder is a system program that needs to track file system and registry changes in the monitoring mode, so you need to have administrative permissions in Windows to run it. When you run the program on Windows Vista or a later OS, you need to allow the program to apply system changes in the User Account Control (UAC) prompt. If you use the evaluation version of the program, you need to press the Evaluate link to close the Evaluation Wizard, which appears at startup.

The program has a modern Ribbon-based interface Pic 1: the Ribbon is available at the top of the main screen A. It consists of four main tabs with items and can also display additional contextual tabs highlighted on the Ribbon when you use some of the available views and editors.

The main program window

Pic 1. The main program window

Under the Ribbon, on the left side of the screen, you can find the Projects view B. This view displays one or multiple installation projects that are currently opened in the program. For a project you can define the project settings, a set of file system and registry changes, changes to the environment variables configuration, the windows services deployment actions, the side-by-side assemblies configuration, drivers deployment actions, printers, Windows firewall configuration entries, custom actions and wrapping settings.

On the right side of the Projects view, you can see the main area, which shows different views depending on your current selection C. If there are no projects opened, you can see the Welcome Screen there with a set of available actions. If a project is selected in the Projects view, you can define the project build properties in the main area. To define a set of file system, registry or other changes to be performed by a deployment package, you should select the corresponding node under the project node in the Projects view. The content of the main area will be switched to the appropriate view. The available views for a regular installation project are the following: File System, Registry, Environment Variables, Services, Assemblies, Drivers, Printers Windows Firewall, Scheduled Tasks and Custom Actions. As for a wrapped packages installation project, there is only the Wrapped Packages view.

At the bottom of the main screen, you can find the Log and Operations views D. The Log view can be used to see all the events and error messages reported by the program. The Operations view can be used to manage the running operations.

To configure the program settings, you can open the Preferences dialog by selecting the corresponding option under the Application menu. The Preferences dialog allows you to configure the monitoring filters and other settings in the program.

What's Inside