Installer changes in new EPiServer Relate+ package

The much awaited EPiServer Relate+ package was released yesterday, you can find more details here.

With Relate+ comes a new version of the installation system that was first released with CMS 5 R2. In this version we have taken the opportunity to move most of the code into a new common library (EPiServerInstall.Common.1.dll) as we found, not surprisingly, that almost everything we had done for CMS 5 R2 was reusable for the Relate+ and Community packages. This does of course mean many breaking changes but we took this decision based on the fact that not many partner developers have started using the installer Cmdlets and API's yet (apologies if you have).

The release includes many bug fixes including better UI validation, real-time execution of Cmdlets (see this blog entry for more details) and probably the most obvious is that the EPiServer Installation Manager has been renamed to EPiServer Deployment Center.

The are 2 main reasons for this:

1. Program links added to the Windows Start Menu containing the words 'install', 'uninstall' or 'setup' are not highlighted as they should be. This is for security reasons.
2. Once we started thinking about changing the name we all agreed that what this application actually does is deploy stuff rather than install it. You will still see the words install and uninstall used in the application but we felt they were still appropriate in their context.

It's worth noting that the actual EPiServer Deployment Center exe file is still called EPiServerInstall.exe. This is for backward compatibility reasons.

A new version of Fredrik Tjärnberg's Power Tools that works with the new API's will be released in due course.

Whilst we appreciate that the installation and deployment of EPiServer products is merely a "starter" to the main course, we naturally want to make sure that it works well, so your feedback is welcome.