Software Deployment

you should take a look at msi readiness analyzer from migrate2vista.com.
it's a free utility that can analyze your msi packages for compatibility with some new technologies from vista and show you any potential problems that may occure.

Theres also this document at the Altiris Juice community:

Packaging applications for Windows Vista

Although much of this info is specific to Altiris products contains good pointers to what issues you will have to take in consideration when packaging for Vista.

Hello.
You can also validate .msi package with msival2 tool which is a part of Windows SDK package (when installing Windows SDK you need separately install MSIVAL2 package). Usage is simple:

msival2.exe <package_name>.msi ISVista.cub

ISVista.cub file is a validation file for Vista. You can validate also against other typos: XPLogo, merge module, etc. This file (or these files) is also part of Windows SDK package.

I would recommend using ORCA 4.0 as this is the version that is compatible with Vista. To be perfectly honoest though i suspect the only real way will be to install it on Vista and see what it does!

I know from reading various books online that various new things about Vista need to be looked at. For example if your deploying core system files OR registry keys these will no longer install at all, wont error at all and will just be skipped by the new version 4 of MSI in Vista.

Who knows, all the packages I have done recently have been validated with Orca 4.0 and have found no problems, Im not sure if thats a good or a bad thing and if it means they will actually work on Vista!!

Paul