The New Infragistics Install Experience

With the release of NetAdvantage 2011 Volume 1, Infragistics has significantly updated our installation experience. In this post, let’s dig into what that means concretely.

First, we made a new “Platform Installer” to help you manage all your Infragistics products. (I strongly recommend grabbing this instead of the individual installers from now on, but you can still get the others if you want.)

https://es.infragistics.com/free-downloads

In creating this new Platform Installer, we had a number of goals, all around improving your installation experience:

• Most importantly, unify the various MSI packages—what this means for you is that no matter how many products you want to install, you only have to run one and only one installer, get one and only one prompt for elevated security, enter your name and key(s) one and only one time, agree to licenses one and only one time, and basically have the installer take care of the rest for you.
• Better key management—as mentioned, you only have to enter your key once for all products, but we also worked on intelligently managing your keys for you, so if, for instance, you previously entered a single-product key but then later entered a bundle, we “upgrade” the stored key instead of keeping a bunch of them that later confuse you when you go in to do maintenance/upgrades—we’ll be sure to use your “best” key so you don’t have to figure out which key is best. We also let you enter multiple individual product keys up front, if that’s your situation.
• Streamline post-release updates (service releases)—by default (you can opt out), the new installer detects if a new service release is available for your selected products and ensures you get the latest and greatest.
• Give you a quick download initially and then let you customize what you want to install and only download and install those bits that you actually want. It will intelligently prioritize and asynchronously download while installing what has been downloaded—as you should expect!
• On the last screen, you can still jump right into our starter projects—a great way to get coding fast with our tools—and now you can also quickly browse some of our showcase application samples.
• Improved UX—we didn’t want to just throw all these new capabilities together ad hoc. Good experience is core to who we are, and the installation experience is no different. We hope you come away feeling like it couldn’t have been better, or better yet, not really even noticing that you had to "install software.”

 

Oh yeah, I almost forgot!  Even though it’s called Platform Installer, it’s also your best tool for seeing what’s installed (including keys), registering/updating your licenses (keys) after installing, removing, or changing what you’ve installed. Maybe we should have called it the One-Stop-Shop-to-Manage-Your-Installed-Infragistics-Software or maybe it’s the One Installer to Rule Them All. :)  Anyways, here’s some more on what this does for ya.

To update your installed licenses, you just run the installer again, enter your key(s), and choose Update Key.

Thanks and enjoy!  And don’t forget to use the rating/feedback tool on the last screen to let us know how we can keep improving your installation experience!