Vista-Manifest and non-latin characters

[NewsArchive]

Hello all,

while preparing my install-routine with SB6 I ran into a wierd problem.

The INSTALL made with SB6 itself runs fine on XP, Vista, Win7, W2Kserver,
W2K8server.

There is no doubt, Setupbuilder can't be praised enough!

My EXE, once installed, then runs fine too, but only on XP and W2K....

On the other systems I got an errormessage that a "side-by-side
configuration error" occured.

That happened ONLY when I used the embedding of the Vista/UAV-Manifest in
my SB6-script.

Thanks to the help of Friedrich I can report now the reason, it is too
simple to be found easily...

You are permitted to add character, numbers and spaces to the "Program
Description", but non-latin characters like german umlauts or scandinavian
/ french / spanish letters with accents lead to that error!

Spaces are allowed - maybe the world ends at the US-border <evil_grin>

This is apparently no error of Setupbuilder, its to be blamed on MicroSoft.



--
Grüße / Regards
Wolfgang Orth

http://www.odata.de



Erstellt mit Operas revolutionärem E-Mail-Modul: http://www.opera.com/mail/

[NewsArchive]

> You are permitted to add character, numbers and spaces to the "Program Description", but non-latin characters like german umlauts or scandinavian / french / spanish letters with accents lead to that error!
>
> Spaces are allowed - maybe the world ends at the US-border <evil_grin>


Most likely, the manifest has a line like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8">

UTF-8 does not contain all accented characters. Not enough codes
available. The manifest would have to be encoded UTF-16 for those
characters.

> This is apparently no error of Setupbuilder, its to be blamed on MicroSoft.

Then again, maybe not <evil_grin>

--
Phil Carroll
http://www.enablingsimplicity.com

[NewsArchive]

In response to one of my clarionmag articles on manifests
(http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/v9/v9n04vista2b.html, sub required),
somebody posted the following in 2007:

"I tried your manifest and it worked great. But I am from Denmark where we
have ý, ý and ý as letters and in the description I want to use these
letters.
But I cannot use these letters with the encoding="UTF-8".
In my printout where I use Xml I use the encoding="ISO-8859-1" to use the
danish letters. But it will not work if I change UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 in the
manifest file. "

Fortunately, nobody sees the information in your manifest, unlike the
code-signing info which can be viewed in Windows Explorer.

Now when you other little countries just drop your silly little languages
and switch to English.... no more problemo......
<g>

Jane

[NewsArchive]

> Fortunately, nobody sees the information in your manifest

The salient point. <g>

My understanding is that UTF-16 is supported in manifests. (After all,
that is the native encoding in all the modern versions of Windows) Of
course, the manifest would have to be UTF-16 encoded if specified.

The problem isn't really the silly little languages. The problem is the
silly old operating systems that don't understand UTF-16. I imagine
killing UTF-8 will be harder than killing analog TV. <g>

--
Phil Carroll
http://www.enablingsimplicity.com

[NewsArchive]

Absolutely. UTF-16 is supported in UAC-aware manifests. But only UTF-8 can
be used in UAC manifests that are fully backward compatible with all
previous Windows operating systems. Not using UTF-8 will definitely result
in a support nightmare.

--
Friedrich Linder
Lindersoft
www.lindersoft.com
+1.954.252.3910

SetupBuilder "point. click. ship"
Create Windows Vista ready installations in minutes

-- Official Comodo Code Signing and SSL Certificate Partner

[NewsArchive]

Hi Friedrich,

> Absolutely. UTF-16 is supported in UAC-aware manifests. But only UTF-8 can
> be used in UAC manifests that are fully backward compatible with all
> previous Windows operating systems. Not using UTF-8 will definitely result
> in a support nightmare.

I did some digging on this last night and this seems to be reported with
manifests that have all English character in the description. Admittedly
the manifests posted in those reports looked off (looked like they had
incorrect entries etc.) so I don't know how much to read into it<g> I seem
to recall seeing the side-by-side error once but don't remember what it was.

Best regards,

--
Arnór Baldvinsson - Icetips Creative, Inc.
Port Angeles, Washington
www.icetips.com - www.buildautomator.com

Icetips product subscriptions at http://www.icetips.com/subscribe.php

[NewsArchive]

Well, I have too learned the hard way, that æøå is not to be used in the
description of manifests.
I think that as long as its illigal charachters in the program name &
description, an error message in the Setupbuilder could be usefull.
As I remember, its one of the features of setupbuilder 7, but if not, it
could be an idea.

Edvard Korsbæk