DeployMaster Release Notes

Software Quality at Just Great Software

Don't let the long lists of issues on this page make you think our products have a lot of problems. Quite to the contrary. All the bugs listed below are bugs that we have fixed. Many of these are corner cases reported by only one or perhaps a handful of our customers. Other software companies often don't spend any effort addressing such issues, much less list them publicly. We take pride in producing high quality software, and often release free updates to ensure you won't have any problems with our software.

Your purchase also comes with one year of free major upgrades. So don't worry if there might be a new major upgrade around the corner just because it's been a while since the last major upgrade. If there is one around the corner, you'll get it free, without having to ask. (But you can keep the old version if you prefer.)

If you ever hit a snag with DeployMaster, check here if you have the latest version. If you do, simply report the issue via email and we'll help you out as soon as we can.

Subscribe to the Just Great Software email newsletter or the Just Great Software RSS newsfeed if you'd like us to notify you of any product updates and other developments.

DeployMaster 4.0.5 – 2 January 2012

On the Media page you can specify a code signing certificate that DeployMaster should use to sign your installer, along with an option to also sign all .exe files that you added to your installer. If any of those .exe files cannot be signed, DeployMaster now adds them to the installer unsigned. The Build tab will still display an error message, but the error is no longer treated as fatal Not signing .exe files to be installed by the setup does not affect the security warnings that occur during installation at all.

If you select a conversation or message in DeployMaster's built-in user forum and press Ctrl+C, an URL pointing to that conversation or message is copied to the clipboard. If you paste that link into a message on the forum, it will now be highlighted as a link. Double-clicking the link will activate the message. The discussion links at the bottom of each help file topic now also open DeployMaster's forum.

DeployMaster uses a .chm file to provide context-sensitive help. This is the standard help system for modern Windows applications. Due to a bug in Internet Explorer 9, if a 64-bit application requests context-sensitive help using a .chm file, and you click on a link in that help file, the calling application will crash. To work around this, we've disabled context-sensitive help in the 64-bit version of DeployMaster if you have Internet Explorer 9 installed on your PC. Pressing F1 will still open the help file, but it will show the first page in the help file, rather than the page that describes the part of DeployMaster you're using.

On the Update page you can configure your installer to require a previous version of your application to be installed. This is useful for building "patch" installers that do not include the entire application, but only files that have changed since a given previous version. If you used this option in previous DeployMaster 4.0.x releases, the generated installer would crash upon startup. Version 4.0.5 restores this feature.

If you turn on the option to allow portable installations and the user clicks the Create Portable Installation button in the installer, then your installer will show a list of removable drives and a field to type in the name of the installation folder. Installers built with previous versions of DeployMaster ignored any drive letters the user added to the installation folder, always using the drive selected in the list. Installers built with DeployMaster 4.0.5 will select the drive in the list when the user types in an installation folder with a drive letter.

See also: DeployMaster 4.0.5 version history

DeployMaster 4.0.4 – 5 December 2011

On the Media page you can specify a code signing certificate that DeployMaster should use to sign your installer. Due to the way DeployMaster 4 builds its installer, you need to let DeployMaster sign your setup.exe while building it instead of signing it by yourself afterward to make sure all security warnings indicate that your installer is fully signed. Unfortunately, previous releases of DeployMaster 4.0.x failed to correctly use your code signing settings, causing it to report that the code signing certificate could not be found. DeployMaster 4.0.4 should correctly use all code signing certificates, whether they're stored in the registry or in a PFX file.

On the 3rd Party page you can specify whether the 3rd party installers are for 32-bit Windows, 64-bit Windows, or both. If you choose to create an installer for a 32-bit-only application or a 64-bit-only application on the Platform page, then 3rd party installers for the opposite bitness are completely excluded from your installer. This worked correctly. But if you selected the combined 32-bit and 64-bit application option on the Platform page, then an installer with integrated 3rd party installers would fail to start on 32-bit Windows if certain integrated installers were 64-bit-only, and vice versa.

If your installer cannot replace certain files, perhaps because they are in use by another application, then it will schedule those files to be replaced upon reboot. Due to a bug in DeployMaster, those files sometimes had their names shortened to 8.3 file names when they were updated upon reboot. If your installer may need to replace files with long names upon reboot, then you should rebuild it with DeployMaster 4.0.4.

See also: DeployMaster 4.0.4 version history

DeployMaster 4.0.3 – 1 December 2011

This release fixes a few more issues we missed in DeployMaster 4.0.x. If User Account Control (UAC) is enabled and the user was logged on as an actual Administrator, the buttons for starting the installation would still attempt to request elevation. Since the Administrator account doesn't require elevation even when UAC is enabled, the installer was stuck at the welcome screen. This situation is unlikely on Windows Vista and Windows 7, because there is no Administrator account by default. Users with administrator privileges require elevation to perform administrative tasks, which the installer requested correctly. This situation is more likely on Windows Server 2008 which has UAC enabled by default and also has a full Administrator account by default. If your customers may want to install your software on Windows Server 2008, you should use DeployMaster 4.0.3 to rebuild any installers that you previously built with DeployMaster 4.0.x.

On the Registry page you can create string values that contain folder placeholders such as %APPFOLDER%. When your installer writes the value to the registry, the placeholders are substituted with the folders the installer actually used. DeployMaster has had this feature since version 1.0.1 but we broke it in version 4.0.0. Installers built with DeployMaster 4.0.3 once again correctly expand folder placeholders in registry values.

See also: DeployMaster 4.0.3 version history

DeployMaster 4.0.2 – 8 November 2011

This release fixes two issues we missed in DeployMaster 4.0.0 and 4.0.1. If you configure your installer to cover the screen with a gradient background, then DeployMaster shows a preview of this background when the Appearance page is active. When running DeployMaster 4.0.0 and 4.0.1 on Windows 7, the background also covered DeployMaster itself, making it impossible to interact with DeployMaster with the mouse. Installers built with DeployMaster 4.0.1 did not have this problem. But if the installer needed elevation on Windows Vista or Windows 7, then covering the screen background caused a (harmless) error about not being able to focus a window.

On the Media page, you can specify that DeployMaster should generate an installer with integrated 3rd party setups and an installer without integrated 3rd party setups. If you specified file names for both, then the setup with integrated 3rd party setups was built incorrectly by DeployMaster 4.0.0 and 4.0.1. The setup would claimed to be damaged when you tried to run it. If you specified a file name for the installer with integrated 3rd party setups only, then it was built correctly. Thus, if your installers built with version 4.0.1 don't claim to be damaged, there's no need to rebuild them with version 4.0.2.

DeployMaster 4.0.1 – 4 November 2011

This release fixes one serious issue and one small issue that we missed in DeployMaster 4.0.0. If User Account Control (UAC) was turned off in Windows Vista or 7, the buttons for starting the installation would still attempt to request elevation. Since that doesn't work when UAC is off, the installer was stuck at the welcome screen. If you rebuild your installer with version 4.0.1, it will correctly detect that UAC is off, and not request elevation. It will correctly detect whether the user has administrator privileges or not, as it does on Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows (which don't have UAC).

The other issue was that when your setup detected that an older version of your application was already installed, the message saying so indicated the version of the new setup being run rather than the version that was already installed. E.g. DeployMaster's own installer (which is built with DeployMaster itself) would say that you already had 4.0.0 installed when in reality you had 3.3.4 installed. This bug did not affect the actual installation, but may have confused the user.

On the Files page, the new option for running executables as part of the installation now has an additional option to make waiting for those executables optional.

The language files that DeployMaster saves for any translations you've made on the Language page or now saved as Unicode. This makes sure characters in all scripts are properly preserved. DeployMaster will still read non-Unicode language files saved by previous versions of DeployMaster as well as UTF-8 and UTF-16 files that start with a Unicode signature (BOM).

DeployMaster 4.0.0 – 1 November 2011

The big new feature in this major upgrade is full support for installing 64-bit applications. On the new Platform page, you can indicate whether your application is 32-bit, 64-bit, or both. On the Files and 3rd Party pages, you can specify for each file whether it is 32-bit, 64-bit, or both (neutral). This allows you to build a single installer that can deploy both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of your software. It also allows you to use a single DeployMaster script to create separate 32-bit-only and 64-bit-only installers for your application.

The new Platform page also allows you to specify which versions of Windows you want to allow your installer to run on. If your application does not support certain versions of Windows, you can make your installer show a message explaining that and prevent installation. Installers built with DeployMaster 4 can support Windows 98 and later. DeployMaster itself now requires Windows 2000 or later.

The Project and Files pages support a new app-specific folder %USERDATA% that defaults to %APPDATAROOT%\AppName for installing data files that the user is likely to modify after installation. On the Files page you can set your installer to grant write access to all users to the %USERDATA% folder or to any other app-specific folder. The new %FONTS% folder on the Files page allows you to install fonts that DeployMaster will automatically register to make them available to all applications.

Setups built with DeployMaster no longer show the black screen security prompt on Windows Vista and 7 when you first run them. This prompt now appears when the user clicks one of the buttons in the installer that starts the installation. This allows people without administrative rights to view the readme file and to create portable installations. The application to be run after installation as specified on the Finished page is now also run without administrator privileges. This option is intended to run the actual application after installation is complete. If you used the Finished page to run an executable or batch file that performed installation tasks, you will need to change your installer to use the new facility on the Files page to run executables. Those are run with administrator privileges (unless a portable install is created). Because the security prompt is now shown at a later stage, it is no longer sufficient to sign the final setup.exe. The actual installer embedded in the final setup.exe needs to be signed as well. DeployMaster can now automatically sign your installer and all executables in it using the Authenticode certificate that you specify on the Media page.

DeployMaster can now generate installers that are larger than 4 GB. Individual files that you add to the installer can also be larger than 4 GB. The new (theoretical) limit is 9 billion GB (2^63 bytes).

When including DeployMaster in an automated build, you can use the /q parameter in combination with /b to stop DeployMaster's GUI from appearing during the build. If your build tool collects tool output via standard I/O, you can use the new DeployMasterCmd.exe console application to invoke DeployMaster and have the build log output to the console or standard output.

If you have any comments or questions about all these new features, select Forum in the Help menu in DeployMaster to connect to the new user forum.

As you can see, this release brings significant changes. That's why it's numbered as a major upgrade. But the number of new features is closer to what you'd expect of a free minor upgrade from Just Great Software. That's why DeployMaster 4 is a free upgrade for all DeployMaster 3 users. Simply download and install it as you would any free minor upgrade.

See also: DeployMaster 4.0.0 version history