Embedding SQL Server Installation and Restoring SQL Server Database Backup during Installation

As mentioned before, most recently i was involved in creation of installer for one of our products. One of the activity that was to be performed during installation was the restoration of database backup and invoking installer of SQL Server after checking registry. In this post i am including links of the articles that i found useful regarding restoration of databse and installation of SQL Server

How to restore a SQL Server database in .NET when there are connections open
(This is the simplest and most effective way that I could find regarding restoring backup file)
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Restore Database during Application Deployment
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Walkthrough: Using a Custom Action to Create a Database at Installation
Demonstrates the use of a custom action and the CustomActionData property to create a database and database table during installation.
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Embedding SQL Server Express into Custom Applications
This white paper discusses how to integrate and deploy Microsoft SQL Server Express-based applications by using configuration files and the ClickOnce deployment technology in Microsoft Visual Studio.
(The good idea that I got from this was to create wrappers for installers that would perform tasks that are not doable through the Installer/Custom Action as it executes after the completion of installation process, not before it)
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How to Embed SQL Server Express in an Application
If your application uses SQL Server Express to host its database, you can freely redistribute the SQL Server Express product with your application. This article contains information and links that will enable you to successfully embed SQL Server Express as part of your application installation.
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Introduction to ORCA: A Tool to Customize Windows Installers

These days I am involved in an activity of launching one of our products in market as ISV (Independent Software Vendor). One of the activities in that is to create an Installer for the product.

The installer that is created for Web Projects through Visual Studio 2010 is quite generalized and it was felt by us that we must tweak it to some extent to fit our actual requirements.

For example, the initial screens of installer ask the user to specify a virtual directory and an application pool. For specifying the virtual directory the installer presents a TextBox and for application pool a combo box is provided. However, in our case we wanted them to be “Non-Editable” fields so that the user is only informed about the virtual directory and application pool.

After research it was found that Windows SDK contains a tool called ORCA which allows us to modify the Installer file as per our requirements
ORCA presents the installer file as a database containing number of tables. For example, there is a table named “Control” which stores information about all the controls used in the installer.

The values in the table can be modified as per the requirement. One problem that I faced is that there is not enough documentation readily available which shows how to use ORCA (Or maybe it is, but I was not able to find it). Therefore I will dedicate a future post to using ORCA.