Size of MSI

[michelpons]

When using the COLTTWix solution to create the COLTT 2.1 MSI, I get a MSI file that weights 6 725 Kbytes. The MSI which is available for download on SF is weighing more than 16 000 Kbytes. Some files may not be there in the MSI I am able to build. I have been using version 262 for that purpose.

[michelpons]

I have made a comparison between two different builds of COLTT installer, one obtained on my machine with Build 263 and one obtained on Michael's machine with Build 246. I used a freeware tool named MSIAnalyzer to get the list of files embedded in each installer. Looks to me that a number of Microsoft Foundation DLLs have not the same version and not the same size. I exported the file lists from each analysis and put the info in the attached Excel file. Files have been filtered by size in Excel in order to see the large ones which are contributing to the difference of MSI sizes. Have a look at mfc90u.dll: MFC library with Unicode support. I don't question it is necessary but why is it 3781960 byte large in Build 246 and 1162744 byte large in Build 263. Makes for a difference of 2.5 Mbytes which is large chunk of the difference of MSI size. Is it because one mfc90u.dll supports both 32-bit and 64-bit?

[michelpons]

Excel file with comparison of Builds 246 and 263

[michaelhalloran]

I can confirm that an .msi built with a clean install of MS VS 2008 is 6.7Mb. An msi built with VS 2008 SP1 is 16Mb. The difference is accounted for by differences in the sizes of the C++ runtime files in those two versions of VS. Since COLTT is not dependant on MS VS 2008 SP1 the expected msi size should be 6.7Mb.

We will need to experiment to see whether a new installer can deliver an older version of the runtime if the objective is to reduce .msi size from the current 16Mb at the 2.2 release.