Some time ago I have been asked to provide a tool to install the universal printer drivers in one shot. I.E. install a STP-Port pointing to the device in question, install the 32bit or 64bit driver creating the queue at the same time. And then add the corresponding other architecture (64/32-bit) drivers queue for point-and-prtint to work across architecture borders.
First I thought of doing this with VS2010, but that seemed to much for such an easy tasked. Next came the NSIS Installer to my mind, but that would have lead to learning again another pürogramming langauge. Also to much for such a tasked. Ideal would be some thing to wrapped around the windows command line batch files I wrote to tests the whole thing.
So I tried with self-extracting files created by 7zip, but that was not that successfull as I thought it would be. But then I came across a wunderful tool, that was sitting for ages in my windows folder and I did not know about: iexpress.exe!
Iexpress is a tool that comes with the Internet Explorer Kits form Micorosft andis part of the OS itself from Windows XP on. So just enter iexpress.exe in the command prompt and the wizard will be started. There is little help on the internet except for two KB and Technet entries at microsoft. But the tool and the wizard itself is self-explanetory so everbody will be get going in no-time.
But the batch files where non-interactive, so I could not enter the IP/FQDN for the STP-Port. That’s when I found the great tools from Horst Schaeffer. They allow you to get GUI-Feedabck when running batch scripts, which was exactly what I needed.
The last problem was the Windows Version. Under Windows Vista and 7 (Windows Nt6.x) it is no problem to add the alternative architecture driver. The Windows NT6 plattform is designed to work like this. But when the tool should operate under Windows XP it will not be able to add the alternative architecture driver that easy. So I thought I skip this under NT5 completely.
That left me in need for a tool to check the version of the OS and actually do something which this. the build-in VER was not the tool-of-choice for this task. Again google was my friend and I found nVer from deepsoftware.ru which is free and can give you the version of any file on your windows OS. So checking the major version of your kernel-dll would do.
So now I had eveything together to script the printer driver installer on the good old trusty commandline (BTW did I told you I hate PowerShell? Ah, never mind, that’s another story anyway…):
nVer, Wbusy/Wprompt/Winput/Wbox and iexpress. And of course the universal printer drivers from my company.
Wonder how I put this all together? Expect a little How-To in the next days…
The connectors which seemed to be a backdraw first, turned out to be a major advantage: Sony has propriatary connectors for the power plug. But as beeing propriatery in its own, Sony is at least consequent: The plugs are identical to the ones of my Sony PlayStation Portabyle PSP-1000 (yes the original one!)