Web PI Options Dialog

As many of you already know, version 2 RTW of Web Platform Installer released in September. So what’s new in this version since RC that was released in March? First of all, Web PI now caches downloaded installers. Second of all, Web PI now supports 9 additional languages – German, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Traditional and Simplified Chinese. This language support extends to both displaying Web PI UI in the language of the current OS locale and installing a product (if available) in the language specified by the user. Finally, the last biggest feature of RTW is extensibility.

All the new features are surfaced through the Options dialog, which is also new in RTW. Here is a list of new features surfaced through the dialog:

Some of these features are rather too big to include them in one article and are described separately through the links provided in each title. Thus, this article will cover only the remaining features surfaced through the Options dialog

  • Installer caching, and
  • Resetting the options

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Installer Caching

In previous versions of Web PI, if installation fails for some reason and the user has to start installation again, Web PI would have to download the selected product again in order to start installation. This version of Web PI caches downloaded products in case it would want them again. Thus, every time you install something it gets cached under

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\installers

If installation fails, you can always run the cached installer that is likely to have a UI that might surface the errors better. Also, if you want to install the same set of products on a different machine, you can just copy the installer cache folder to that machine to the same location and Web PI will pick it up. No worries if an installer gets updated for a product, since Web PI will compare the time stamps and download the newer file when you request to install the product again. The size of the cache is always shown in the dialog. If it gets too big or you don’t find it useful anymore (everything installs fine), you can clear the cache by clicking on “Delete installer cache folder” hyperlink.

Resetting the options

From the command line you can launch Web PI with a /reset switch that will restore your options to the default state:

"%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\WebPlatformInstaller.exe" /reset

Enjoy the new set of features in Web Platform Installer and please provide your feedback to help us make the product serve your needs better!

4 Comments

  • I tried running this command to reset the cache, but it is not recognized by the comand prompt. Is there something I'm doing worng? I was told to do this after using Web PI for installation, and it did not successfully install PHP 5.2.13. It stated that the Downloaded file failed signature verification and may have been tampered with. Any help with this would greatly be appreciated. Its starting to frustrate me because I've gotten so much information on this, but nothing is helping me. Thanks in advance.

    Russell

  • Russell, I forgot to wrap %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\WebPlatformInstaller.exe in quotes... so the command to reset the options is:

    “%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\WebPlatformInstaller.exe” /reset

    If this doesn't help you, you can send your WebPI logs located at %localappdata%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\logs\webpi (or "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\logs\webpi" for XP/Windows Server 2003) to "webpi at microsoft dot com" and I will be happy to help you with your installation problems.

  • I have a bunch of developers and a bunch of servers. I really don't want to burn bandwidth needing to download everything for every machine. Is there a way of changing (or adding a path to) the installer cache to a common network share?

  • You just need to download everything on one machine and copy the cache to other machines. Once you download everything you need, copy the folder %localappdata%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\installers\ to the same location on other machines. If the remote installers havent changed since they were cached (the checksums are the same) Web PI will automatically use them from that folder.

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