PACE Suite 4.5

In PACE Suite 4.5, we have focused on one of essential parts of software packaging – managing Custom Actions and Device Drivers. Our principal goal in this release was to simplify working with drivers and custom actions and provide enough guidance (especially through smart Wizards) so that even after complex customizations, our users will end up with packages that work.

Wizard for adding Drivers

The new “Add Driver” Wizard guides you through every step of including drivers into your packages and saves you time with useful tricks like automatically detecting and displaying all files that are related to your driver.The Wizard allows you to manage various aspects of driver files (for instance, their compression type), set driver installation options, conditions, and choose target architecture.

New Drivers Tab

We have added a new separate tab for Device Drivers, where you can review, edit, and remove drivers. The tab shows details such as driver installation files (INF), files that are related to a particular driver, conditions, and installation options.You can set various installation options like overwriting an existing driver, adding a separate entry to Programs and Features in the Control Panel and others. All the changes you make are highlighted, and validation errors (if any) are displayed. 

Smart Custom Actions Wizard

To simplify adding and editing custom actions, we have developed the “Add Custom Action” Wizard. The most exciting feature of our Wizard is that it takes into consideration your every input on every step and later disables options that are incompatible with your previous choices.For instance, if the basic type is “Launch an EXE”, the tree-like interface displays only EXE files and filters out everything unrelated; when you select a sequence position where your custom action will be run, all positions, incompatible with your previous choices, are disabled and so on. 

Completely redesigned Custom Actions tab

Meet new Custom Actions tab, which now displays custom and standard actions from all sequences, as well as not-sequenced custom actions, which are present only in the CustomAction table and do not have references in other sequence tables.Various custom action details such as their basic type, execution mode, and others are in this tab. Here, you can edit custom actions, move them up or down in a sequence or put your custom actions directly into the required sequence position (PACE Suite only displays positions that are available for your particular custom action). All changes you make are highlighted, and errors and warnings are displayed. 

And even more improvements!

As usual, we do not forget about continuous improvement of existing features. We increased the stability of how several features in MSI Generator and MSI Editor work in especially tricky packaging scenarios. To save you a few mouse clicks, we added file type association with Wise Package Studio .WSI project files, and now you can open them with MSI Editor directly from the context menu.You can find detailed description of the new features in PACE Suite 4.5 Release Notes. Don’t forget to check our PACE Suite User Manual – your go-to guide to software packaging with PACE Suite.