99 Bottles of Beer On The Wall

A few months back a former coworker of mine introduced me to a web site called 99 Bottles of Beer. The premise of the site is simple: One Program in 1023 variations. I couldn't help notice that Windows Installer was missing. I wanted to implement an MSI version but there was one catch: MSI doesn't really have any arithmetic operators and I didn't want to be cheesy and call out to a custom action since that really wouldn't be pure MSI.

Fortunatly Kalle Olavi Niemitalo pointed out to me that you could fake it using single digit string properties like this:

Property Table
Dec9=8
Dec8=7 ( and so on )

ControlEvents
[NextTemp] Dec[NextIndexOne]
[NextIndexOne] [[NextTemp]]

If you start off with NextIndexOne = "9" then NextTemp is assigned Dec9 which in turn assigns 8 to NextIndexOne. A fake decrement operator. You can do the same thing for the tens position when a rollover of the ones occurs and add some additional logic for when you get to 0.

It's kinda silly but fun and hey, Windows Installer just HAD to be represented!