Member Avatar for furjaw

I developed a Windows application that I intend to market.
I created a web page with Expressions Web (replaced Front Page).
I have a button labeled "Download 30 Day Free Trial" which I linked to MyApp.zip.
It downloads the zip file, but, there is no indication that it is doing anything.
There is no progress bar.

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For and others: a browser can only show a reliable download progress if it knows the total size up front. If the HTTP response does not include a Content-Length header (or uses chunked/streamed output), the browser cannot calculate percent-complete and many UIs show no progress. See the header behavior on MDN: Content-Length header and Transfer-Encoding (chunked).

Quick checks and fixes:

  • Inspect the response headers with a simple HEAD request or your browser devtools network tab. Example:

    curl -I https://yourserver.example.com/file.zip

    Look for Content-Length and absence of Transfer-Encoding: chunked. Static files served by IIS/Apache normally include Content-Length; dynamic scripts must explicitly set it or stream carefully.

  • If a server-side script streams the file, change it to send a Content-Length (the file size) before sending the body, or let the web server serve the file directly. Also check whether on-the-fly compression or a proxy/CDN is removing the length header.

About installers and prerequisites: an MSI package itself does not automatically download and install other prerequisites. To install runtimes (for example .NET or VC++ redistributables) you need a bootstrapper/installer wrapper that chains packages (setup.exe, Visual Studio bootstrapper, WiX Burn, InstallShield, etc.). See Microsoft guidance on creating bootstrappers and the msiexec reference: and msiexec.

If an in-page progress UI is desired, use XHR/Fetch progress events to show a progress bar and then save the blob; see MDN on monitoring progress with XMLHttpRequest: Using XMLHttpRequest - monitoring progress.

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Member Avatar for Jaseva

The user's browser should show them a progress indicator.

Member Avatar for furjaw

I had my download button linked to Setup.exe.
I changed it to link to Setup1.msi and I did get a progress bar.
Now, the question is, will it install the prerequisits!

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