Project84 - Sorting Applications in BDD 2007

Monday, November 05, 2007

Sorting Applications in BDD 2007

You may have read an article by Ben Hunter on sorting the applications in BDD so they are easier to find when adding them to the Task Sequencer of Database Role. The article can be found here.

An issue arose the other day that necessitated the re-ordering of application in BDD. The current build process that I am working on uses Windows Powershell to do a lot of post build customizations. In testing we found that Powershell was being installed before the .Net Framework. This seemed odd to me as we are using a role to installed our Tier 1 application.

After looking into the issue a bit more it seems that BDD does not honour the order of application defined in the role but installs them in the order they are listed in Applications.xml. This was a problem for us so I set about extending the bddsort application so I could specify any order I wanted. Hence BDD Application Sorter was born.

The program is simple to use, all you need to do is open the Applications.xml file, re-order the application and save the file again. I make a back of Applications.xml just in case but I have never had an issue with the program to date.

Anyway, BDD Application Sorter is attached below. Enjoy!

BBDAppsSort.zip (13.74 KB)

Update: New Version to support Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

The version below will work for the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
MDTAppSort.zip (23.44 KB)

.net | BDD 2007 | Desktop Deployment

posted on Monday, November 05, 2007 11:46:00 AM (E. Australia Standard Time, UTC+10:00)

Monday, November 05, 2007 12:01:19 PM (E. Australia Standard Time, UTC+10:00)

Hi,

This tool looks great. I have one question however, have you thought about installing applications from within the task sequence? This gives you the ability to determine the exact order that applications will install and when reboots occur. This is my perfered method of installing applications.

Thanks,
Ben

Ben Hunter

Monday, November 05, 2007 12:15:18 PM (E. Australia Standard Time, UTC+10:00)

We did consider using the Task Sequencer to install applications and we also considered using dependancies for things like Powershell and the .Net Framework but in the end the deciding factor was that we had too many areas in which operational staff needed to change settings. So we settled on having all the settings in the database and minimal config defined via CustomSettigns.ini and the Task Sequencer.

You do have a good point though, the Task Sequencer does seem like a better solution for this problem.

Jacob Hodges

Comments are closed.