I've noticed that the articles, tutorials and samples of creating the custom dialogs in Wix always use the same dialog size - Width="370" Height="270"(in the installer units) which corresponds to 494px * 360px for 96DPI. The example is http://blogs.technet.com/b/alexshev/archive/2008/10/16/from-msi-to-wix-part-20-user-interface-required-dialog-boxes.aspx
Moreover, a lot of MSI installers use exactly this size for the dialogs. I wonder where this size value came from? Is there any guideline about the installer dialog size?
These standard values for MSI UI dialogs come from Windows SDK, the uisample.msi file.
This size is close to the standard wizard Wizard interface, and MSI “Wizards” mimic Wizard '97 UI. See Wizard '97 sample image, the size of the image is 513 × 397 px.
If there's anything special about it, it likely hails from a size that looked good on a default Windows 95 or so taskbar configuration with a screen resolution of 640x480 pixels. Realistically you can use other sizes, such as Visual Studio's installation which is much larger.
Related
I am trying to install a WiX managed bootstrapper setup .I have written a custom logic to calculate the size occupied .Is there any way to supress the default size shown by WiX in control panel entry.
You can use the ARPSIZE property to set your preferred install size in case Windows is computing this value incorrectly.
<Property Id='ARPSIZE'>app size in kilobytes</Property>
ARPSIZE seems to be superfluous at first sight. However, testing shows that Programs and Features reports a completely bogus value (over 4 GB) for very small packages. In this case, providing the package size manually can help overcome this annoying but harmless nuisance.
https://www.firegiant.com/wix/tutorial/com-expression-syntax-miscellanea/add-or-remove-programs-entries/
More info about ARPSIZE: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/arpsize
I feel that the dialogs provided by the WixUIExtension have a look that remembers me of Windows 95.
Example screenshot from an example of the WiX Tutorial built with WiX 3.10 (*cough* on Win 7):
(I know how to replace the bitmaps.) The icons (disks, folders) have 16 colors, text boxes and combo boxes look quite old.
Maybe I missed something obvious.
Is there a way to give these dialogs a slightly more modern look without rewriting them from scratch?
You can replace the bitmaps and icons but the controls and their appearance are part of MSI and can't be changed. That's one of the reasons I use Burn bundles even when I don't have a chain -- it requires coding but the UI can be completely controlled.
The guide for Windows Phone 8 app bars states that AppBar button icons should be 48x48px. It also says that a bunch of sample icons can be found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Icons.
But the images in there are 76x76px. And they work fine, at least on the emulator they do.
So what's the proper size?
So what's the proper size?
76x76, because then you support higher resolutions. If you use 48x48, it'll be scaled up for WXGA and 720p, rather than down (for WVGA), with the quality being slightly worse.
The factor is roughly 1.6, which is the same as for the Tile Sizes
And to prove the point, here's our application, using 76x76 application icons: Skype | Windows Phone Store
They are 48x48px as the people above have said, but the 76x76px ones you are seeing are for devices with a different screen size from that set by Visual Studio as default.
If you are looking for any additional icons do check out Templarian's open-sourced icon project http://modernuiicons.com/. The .zip includes light and dark themes icons as well as the initial Expressions Blend .design file and the .xaml coding of the icon.
They have to be a minimum of 48x48, you can have a bigger (square) size and it will scale down accordingly.
I'm building an installer using WiX and I want all my installer's dialogs to be larger than the default dimensions. Is there a central spot where I can set a width and height for all dialogs in my installer? If not, is there at least a way to change the built-in dialogs' dimensions?
In WiX v3.6 you can use localization files to change size and location of dialogs and controls. See my blog post for details. It's still a lot of work to change everything.
I have a number of .ico files in my installer that have various renderings for different palette depths, sizes, etc. These display on the MSI's UI rather than being a part of the installation process.
Unfortunately, each of these icon files are displaying the 4-bit palette depth version, which looks a bit rubbish. Is there a way to get the icons to display at the full 8-bit palette?
8-bit icons are unsupported in Windows Installer. I got around the problem by having the 4-bit icons re-drawn so they looked better in the lower colour palette.
Why not delete the 4 bit version from the icon and keep only the 8 bit one version?