Resiliency

Resiliency is the ability of an application to recover gracefully from situations in which a vital component is missing, or has been replaced by an incompatible version. By authoring an installation package and using the Installer Functions, developers can use the Windows Installer to produce resilient applications capable of recovering from such situations.

  • Use the installer's source list to increase the resiliency of applications that rely on network resources. For more information, see Source Resiliency.
  • Use the installer's API to check whether a vital feature, component, file, or file version is installed.
  • Use the installer's API to check the path to a component at run time. This reduces your application's dependency on static file paths, which commonly differ between computers.
  • Use the installer to reinstall damaged shortcuts, registry entries, and other components without having to rerun setup.
  • Increase the resiliency of your product's installation by leaving the rollback capability of the installer enabled. For more information, see Rollback Installation.