Peter Seale's weblog

Friday, May 30, 2008 8:00:07 AM UTC 

Before I start, I'd like to acknowledge the fact that having strong opinions about an obscure Windows command-line utility is so not cool. I'm with you.

Things I don't like about using MAKECAB.EXE:

• If you forget to set an obscure property in your DDF manifest, MAKECAB will silently and happily exclude large files, despite the fact that you explicitly included them in the DDF manifest. Not only is this bad error handling, but it also gives you a false sense of security. This leads to the most awful troubleshooting sessions, where you have to dig into every layer of the stack, before coming back and double-checking every layer. This aggravating troubleshooting session is followed by a brief eureka moment, followed immediately by intense rage.
  Obscure property to set: .Set MaxDiskSize=<<some massive bytecount, I'd go 1 billion plus>>
  • Fun footnote: most online samples fail to set this obscure property, including MSDN and several blogs who obviously copied their DDFs from MSDN, which is why this is such a huge problem. Very few of the online examples get this right!
• The MAKECAB.EXE SDK document uses Times New Roman as its font. That dates it at pre-1997, when we were all still using either Office 6.0 or Office 95. Awesome. This isn't a complaint as much as it is an observation—OLD!
• Diamond Directive Files! DDF manifests are awful and, in my limited needs, completely unnecessary! Whenever I need to build a CAB file manually (it's happened a few times), I fired up PowerShell and used a single CabLib Extract/Compress function call to do the same thing that your no-longer-necessary-but-you'd-better-get-all-the-syntax-perfect MAKECAB+DDF file solution did.  And I didn't even have to bust out the ancient Times New Roman-sporting manual! (see below for actual script; it's tiny)

Takeaways

• Obscure property to set in your DDF manifest: .Set MaxDiskSize=<<some massive bytecount, I'd go 1 billion plus>> 
• If you're using MAKECAB.EXE as part of your Visual Studio build process, switch to WSPBuilder! You're not losing anything by swapping out one post-build command-line EXE for another, and will gain MUCH more in WSPBuilder's functionality.
• Use the following PowerShell snippet (or use it as a starting point for your own improved version) to compress cab files:

Copy-pasty version:

function Compress-Directory ($dir, $cabFileFullPathAndFilename)
{
    [void][reflection.assembly]::LoadFile(
        "C:\Program Files\WSPBuilder\CabLib.dll")
    $c = new-object CabLib.Compress
    $c.CompressFolder($dir, $cabFileFullPathAndFilename, $null, 0)
}

Compress-Directory "C:\temp" "C:\sandbox\a.cab"