List of Interview Question for Application packagaing and Application Deployment for Windows Installer, Wise Package Studio and other tools...


- Describe the process flow of an installation in terms of the User Interface, Immediate and Deferred sequences.
- Explain the difference between Property and PROPERTY
- Advertised vs non-advertised shortcuts, what's the difference?
- ProductCode, PackageCode, UpgradeCode - what are they, and when do you change them
- suppose you're in an environment where you can't use advertisement, explain how you would go about setting userspecific settings
--What are the ADDLOCAL and ADDSOURCE properties?
--Give an example of something you would not package
--What is the difference between installations using ALLUSERS=””, ALLUSERS=1 and ALLUSERS=2 option?
- Maximum how many files you can add in msi?
- Explain Backend mechanism of Self repair
- What is the impact of leaving COM information in a generic registry component as apposed to in each relevant component
- How many sequences are there in an MSI

- Please sketch the entire process of creating a package, from the software request up to package delivery


- Difference between dll/ocx and exe registraction
- How we can make two applications with same GUID to install on the same
    machine?
- How we create the small,minor and major upgrade?
- Why we use orca for editing MSI?

- Is the MSI file a relational database?"  if answers correctly "yes"....

- Why is this important?"  they better say something about system integrity, ability to roll back transactions, etc. 

- wat is the disadvantage of using lock permissions table
- Have you worked on orca?
- How to add files/registries in Orca?
- How to create merge module?
- Self-Heal (advertised shortcut) Vs Install on Demand (product Advertising)
- Self-Heal Vs Repair
- Per-user installation Vs Per-machine installation
- The reason why during a repair, bringing back missing files to System Folders is possible for a standard user who actually does not have a write permission to these folders.
- Do you know how to play darts?
- Do you know how to make coffee?
- How would you configure 16 Bit ODBC for a non Microsoft DSN?
- What are your thoughts and experiences for patching .msi files? What approaches have worked the best? What hasn't worked? Why?
- Describe a methodology for populating the user's profile with Windows Installer functionality. That one was funny because the interviewer was looking for Active Setup which I didn't consider to be specific to Windows Installer.
- How do you configure an installation for an application that requires administrative privileges to work if the end user is not a local machine administrator?
- Have you ever had to modify a .msi directly without a graphic interface? Which tables did you modify and why?
- Describe the most difficult project you have worked on. What was the problem? How did you solve it? What did you learn?
- What tools are in your "packaging toolkit?"