Over the next few days I’m going to be building and testing a deployment for the Infrastructure Design Suite for about 150 users.  Already I’ve run into some interesting revelations so I thought I’d chronicle my experience to hopefully save those who go after me some time and headaches.

First big lesson: When you choose to include Civil 3D, Map, and AutoCAD in your deployment you get three complete installations.
That’s right folks.  It’s not three separate AutoCAD profiles like you’d expect (or at least I did), you get three complete installations.  I haven’t decided yet whether this is a good thing or a bad thing but I do know it’s going to make me rethink my deployment strategy.

Within every installer is a "staller" (couldn’t resist that play on words)
Another really helpful thing I’ve learned deals with batching your Civil 3D installation along with other stuff.  In the past, when I tried to call the Civil 3D installation then something after it, the next thing would execute before Civil 3D finished and there would be a big mess.  Thanks to this post from The CADMasters blog I was able to put a stall function in my batch file that would force the batch file to wait until Civil 3D was done.  I had to tweak it a bit to get it to work, here’s the resulting "staller" piece of the batch file:

CALL CIVIL 3D DEPLOYMENT HERE
set tempfile=c:\windows\temp\tmp.txt
:IsRunning
REM **********Wait until Previous install is finished before calling next install************
PING 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 10000 >NUL
del %tempfile%
tasklist > %tempfile%
type c:\windows\temp\tmp.txt |find /i "setup.exe"
if errorlevel 0 if not errorlevel 1 goto IsRunning
CALL SOMETHING ELSE HERE

See you when I post Part 2!