MSI installer, Wix and dialog size value

6
votes

I've noticed that the articles, tutorials and samples of creating the custom dialogs in Wix always use the same dialog size - Width="370" Height="270"(in the installer units) which corresponds to 494px * 360px for 96DPI. The example is http://blogs.technet.com/b/alexshev/archive/2008/10/16/from-msi-to-wix-part-20-user-interface-required-dialog-boxes.aspx Moreover, a lot of MSI installers use exactly this size for the dialogs. I wonder where this size value came from? Is there any guideline about the installer dialog size?

2
wixwindows-installer

2 Answers

1
votes

These standard values for MSI UI dialogs come from Windows SDK, the uisample.msi file.

This size is close to the standard wizard Wizard interface, and MSI “Wizards” mimic Wizard '97 UI. See Wizard '97 sample image, the size of the image is 513 × 397 px.

0
votes

If there's anything special about it, it likely hails from a size that looked good on a default Windows 95 or so taskbar configuration with a screen resolution of 640x480 pixels. Realistically you can use other sizes, such as Visual Studio's installation which is much larger.