Fun with MSDE

[Dan Kegel]

The "free" ASP.NET IDE from http://www.asp.net, Web Matrix,
uses MSDE (the embedded SQL server that fed the Slammer worm).
MSDE can be "freely" downloaded from http://www.asp.net/msde/

Out of curiosity, I tried installing MSDE on cvs wine today.   A few notes:

The installer is an Installshield Package-for-the-web wrapper
around an MSI installer.

A couple fixmes show up while displaying the initial EULA window:
fixme:win:SetWindowTextA cannot set text "" of other process window (nil)
fixme:propsheet:PROPSHEET_CollectPageInfo Could not load resource #0000?

The EULA dialog box (which uses richedit)
doesn't wrap lines on wine like it does on windows.
(Its title is wrong, too; not suprising given the fixme.)

On WinXP, Win98 and Wine, the package-for-the-web installer
doesn't stat the real installer after it unpacks.  This is normal.
(Oddly, it does a ShellExecute of the nonsensical executable
[Param_Launch], but that's just a bug in their InstallShield
script, I think.)

To continue on, one then runs c:/sql2ksp3/MSDE/setup.exe by hand.
On Win98, it put up a dialog box or two, but aborted, saying "A strong SA password
is required for security reasons... Setup will now exit."
On Wine, it terminated silently, as I didn't have MSI.DLL and friends
installed.  Copying in those files (roughly, MSI*.* from c:/windows/system)
got me further
Running with winver = winxp, it failed with a dialog box saying
   Fatal SQLUNIRL.DLL Initialization Error
   File: ..\src\procaddr.c, line: 422
   NDDEAPI.DLL Could not be loaded, NT Error 2
Running with winver = win98, it failed with a dialog box saying
   Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine
   Setup requires Internet Explorer version 5.0.2314.0 or above.

OK, that's enough fun for me for today.  I was just curious to
see how far the install would go, I'm not interested in actually
using MSDE.

- Dan

-- 
Dan Kegel
http://www.kegel.com
http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=78045