The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 29, 2002
Filed:
Mar. 27, 2000
Jeff A. Zimniewicz, Bellevue, WA (US);
Crista Johnson, Seattle, WA (US);
Phillip J. Marino, Dublin, OH (US);
Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA (US);
Abstract
Presented is a system and method for creating, extending, or otherwise modifying an application program suite. Specifically, by writing setup database files for each individual application to be included in a suite in accordance with the data structure required by the Suite Integration Toolkit (SIT), these applications may be combined to form, or added to, a suite. Components for a suite are listed in several sections of the setup database file. Since this list is not set to any fixed number of components, the list can be changed at any time before setup.exe is run. Once setup.exe is run, the file is parsed for the information in the relevant sections. The data in these fields is used without any understanding of the specifics of the suite, which allows the SIT engine/technology to be ignorant of the specifics of the suite. As a result, the suite owner/writer is afforded the maximum flexibility in creating or modifying a suite of applications. In addition to integrating the applications into a suite thereby allowing a single seamless install/setup, the SIT engine of the instant invention also provides proper dependency checking and error recovery. During the installation of the suite, the SIT engine determines the superset of information needed by each application for acquisition from the user. If a single application requires different information for a particular field than that required by the other programs, a separate entry for that particular program will be generated and will supply that information only to that particular program.