INFO: In a Transform, Resources Should Be Added to New Components Hooked to New Features (225522)

SUMMARY

When adding resources in a transform, users should create new components for these resources and hook these new components to new leaf node features. New components are necessary due to refcounting issues and new features are necessary because of multi-user issues.

MORE INFORMATION

To add resources using a transform, the following rules should be followed:

Add one or more new components to the .msi file to contain the new resources.
Those newly added components should be added to a new feature. This is to avoid conflicts between users, because the installer tracks the list of components per feature in a per-machine location (and not a per-user location).
Those new features should be "leaf node" features; that is, those new features should have no children.
Those features should have unique names (primary keys in the Feature table) across transforms for that product. In other words, any two transforms that can be applied to the same product for different users of the same machine should never contain identically named features that differ in terms of the components and/or resources that they contain.

If these rules are not followed, situations may result where the Installer always believes that a given feature is broken, resulting in repeated attempts to repair that feature.