Random folder location, disable uac, firewall exception... more

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to make an installer and I've found several problems at the moment... I'll list them all here:

1) I am wanting to make an installer that installs to a random location under their main C:\ folder, a 10 character random folder name for example:

C:\s92koroope\main\fileshere.txt

I can't for the life of me figure out how to make a random function in nsis...

2) I know there is code to check if they have UAC enabled, but is it possible to offer a way to disable it?

3) How can I detect if they have windows firewall enabled, how do I add exceptions to the firewall?

4) How do I detect if windows thinks they have an antivirus installed (if they do I want to show a popup message)

5) I am also wanting to detect if the following are installed, if they aren't installed it needs to download and install them...
Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
Visual C++ 2012 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
.NET Framework 3.5
.NET Framework 4.0
.NET Framework 4.5


6) As part of the above, I want it to make sure DirectX9 SDK is forcefully updated, rather than an old version of directx 9 being installed

Thanks very much! 🙂

Originally Posted by TheOnlyLeader View Post

1) I am wanting to make an installer that installs to a random location under their main C:\ folder, a 10 character random folder name for example:

C:\s92koroope\main\fileshere.txt

I can't for the life of me figure out how to make a random function in nsis...

You could try ${StdUtils.Rand}, for example:

Originally Posted by TheOnlyLeader View Post

2) I know there is code to check if they have UAC enabled, but is it possible to offer a way to disable it?

Why would you want to do this? If an application could simply disable UAC, this would break the whole concept of UAC. I guess an application running with "Admin" rights could still do it - maybe by emulating user mouse/keyboard inputs - but is it a good idea?

Originally Posted by TheOnlyLeader View Post

3) How can I detect if they have windows firewall enabled, how do I add exceptions to the firewall?

Look at Firewall plug-in:

Originally Posted by TheOnlyLeader View Post

4) How do I detect if windows thinks they have an antivirus installed (if they do I want to show a popup message)

Windows 10 introduces a new API to allow applications to interact with the A/V software:


Not sure there is something like that in earlier Windows versions...

Originally Posted by TheOnlyLeader View Post

5) I am also wanting to detect if the following are installed, if they aren't installed it needs to download and install them...
Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
Visual C++ 2012 SP1 Redistributable Package (x86)
.NET Framework 3.5
.NET Framework 4.0
.NET Framework 4.5

I usually do detect those via Registry 😉

Visual C++ Runtime:
ReadRegDWORD $0 HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\VC\Runtimes\x86" "Installed"
ReadRegDWORD $1 HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\VC\Runtimes\x86" "Major"
ReadRegDWORD $2 HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\VC\Runtimes\x86" "Bld"

.NET Framework:
ReadRegDWORD $0 HKLM "SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4\Full" "Release"

Originally Posted by TheOnlyLeader View Post

6) As part of the above, I want it to make sure DirectX9 SDK is forcefully updated, rather than an old version of directx 9 being installed

You can simply run the DirectX installer in a mode that works without user interaction. It will install DirectX, if it is not installed yet; it will update the existing DirectX installation, if the installed version is older; and, otherwise, it does nothing.

See also:

3) with one of the firewall plugins, 4) with WmiInspector plugin
2) 5) 6) through appropriate reg keys; do your googling to know which
1) the easy way is:

GetTempFileName $0
Delete $0
${GetBaseName} "$0" $0 # FileFunc.nsh
CreateDirectory "C:\$0\main" 

This will produce 5-char folder names in ns*** format. It that's not acceptable, you'll need to cook something with either NsRandom/StdUtils plugin or one of these.

Edit: come to think of it, it's easy enough to use GetTempFileName to produce longer strings without ns prefix, although they're not truly random (it will be e.g. e91e92...).

StrCpy $1 ""
# repeat as many times as desired:
GetTempFileName $0
Delete $0
${GetBaseName} "$0" $0
StrCpy $0 $0 "" -3 # remove "ns"
StrCpy $1 "$1$0"
MessageBox MB_OK "string: $1"