Random information about the project
Q. Why are you doing this?
Because we needed to have an installer for another project and I looked at the costs of the features I wanted. At one end of the scale you have, for lots of money, the ability to do everything and at the other you have an upgrade for visual studio that can't handle upgrades and patches. Since programming the installer is relatively simple we decided that the expensive solutions were far too expensive for what they were and decided to write our own.
Q. Why not use the Visual Installer that Microsoft released for Visual Studio?
Although the installer that Microsoft have released is suitable for creating an initial basic installer it is deficient in some rather major areas. The one that triggered this whole project is the inability for it to create upgrades and patches.
Q. Why not use one of the commercial applications?
Although the commercial tools are fully featured they have a few drawbacks, the largest being that they cost money and so the open source community doesn't have access to them. Having looked at what is available for the open source community to use the only option was to write something for them.
Q. Who is developing this project?
Internally the project is being driven by one person, Jon Shute, with help being provided by anybody who can't run away in time. I can be contacted at jonshute@chimpswithkeyboards.com.
Q. What language is it written in?
At the moment it is written mainly in C# with a bit of C++ for the mainly windows API work. We are using the .NET framework.
Q. Will there be a Linux port?
Unlikely since it's a bit too Windows specific. You would have to recreate the MSI engine under Linux, and that would be a lot of work.
Q. When will it be ready?
Version 1 is currently stalled, but the source code in SourceForge has the ability to modify MSI files in a similar way to Orca.