Visio Solution Publishing Tool - some Visio stencil names shown uppercase

[Paul Herber]

Hopefully not too off-topic here! Chris - how about adding a new forum for tools such as Visual Studio and Visio Solution Publishing Tool?
Anyway, I'm starting to use VS and VSPT to create msi installers for my Visio stencils and with some files the filename gets shown as all uppercase. The filename is fine in Explorer, Visio, Visual Studio, but in VSPT the name is all uppercase. Now, all these filenames have fewer than 8 letters in their name, is this just VSPT showing some weird behaviour related to old DOS 8.3 filenames which could only be uppercase?

[Nikolay]

Hi Paul,

I think you can just ignore that. I mean, although the files are shown uppercase,
the installed files should be in proper case; they are just shown that way in the publishing tool.

According to my experience, a good tool to create MSI for Visio-related stuff is WIX, which be downloaded from the codeplex.
The major advantage over VS Setup project is flexibility (you can customize user interface for example)

The Visio publishing tool does not seem to do rocket science actually, the magic is documented:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832029/en-us
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb677166.aspx

I've attached a sample wix-based setup with source code to this post;
It does not use Visual studio setup project or Visio publishing tool; it publishes templates and stencils for Visio directly using Windows Installer's PublishComponent.
This sample setup installs 2 stencils and 2 templates; after installation they should show up in Visio UI (see the screenshot).
To build the project you should have WIX 3.5 installed.

Note that the publishing tool from Visio 2010 SDK seems to have a flaw when creating setups for Visio x32 installed on x64 windows -
the MSI generated by the tool may not work in this environment. That is, the "ConfigChangeID" registry key in this case will not be updated.
See here: http://visguy.com/vgforum/index.php?topic=1619.0

[Paul Herber]

Many thanks, Nikolay. I had a quick look at Wix a few weeks ago but thought the learning curve might be a bt too long. I've been using Advanced Installer for a while for other Windows software, but there appear to be problems with creating installations for Visio stencils and templates.
The project setup in VS seems to work at a very basic level, however, without manually editing the .vdproj file there appears to be no way to change the Manufacturer name away from Microsoft, or the software Version data. And having been used to Delphi and similar tools using VS is slower than a slow thing on a really slow day.

[Nikolay]

Hi Paul,

Indeed it seems that now the publishing tool works correctly, sorry for misleading. Probably I had this issue with beta, or something. That is, if you create x86-installer and install it for x86-Visio on either x86 or x64 system, it works just fine, and if you create x64-installer and install it on x64-Visio it also works fine.

Although it appears that you can't do both; i.e. you can't bundle stencils/templates for both Visio-x64 and Visio-x86 in one package using the publishing tool, it doesn't appear to work. I mean, the checkbox "Register for both x64/x86" Visio in the publishing tool's settings.