There is a wizard to help you get started and lots of configuration screens.
Let me start with the positive by saying that the UI for building an install is polished and nicely integrated into Visual Studio.
As with any "Limited Edition," I had some serious concerns that it would do what I needed without hitting the "pay wall." Looking online, I saw that the prices, Professional for $1,999 and Express for $599, are a little outside my budget (considering my infrequent use). InstallShield has always been a feature-packed and polished installer, so I was excited to have a free version to use. InstallShield is featured more prominently, so I didn't even realize Visual Studio Installer still existed until I sat down to write this article! I haven't evaluated it, so I don't know if my issues with the 2008 version have been addressed. Visual Studio 2010 comes with a Setup Project similar to VS2008 and a downloadable Limited Edition of InstallShield. Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio Installer It may still exist, but I couldn't find it in any form that was usable (for example, you can't actually purchase it or find out the price on the vendor's Web site). Sadly it was bought by somebody who was bought by somebody. This was a great product and as a bonus, was built by a Michigan company. My next stop was an installer I had previous experience with from way back: Wise Install. An extra step to the build process and the temp file used for extraction was left around for the user to delete (ugly).
Despite my settings to that effect, the files were always output separately, which means that I needed to create a self-extracting zip executable to actually perform the install. I had a problem getting the installer to package my prerequisites in a single exe file. If a user tries to run a newer install, it basically tells them to manually uninstall the old version first! It was workable, but fairly ugly (from a code-base perspective).Īnother issue I had is that the installer doesn't support updates to your program.
That meant that I put installation/uninstallation support code in my main executable and called it via command line switches. It has hooks to run external executables, but doesn't have any custom scripting. One downside of this installer is that it doesn't support custom actions very well. I was able to produce a workable install (including Java as a prerequisite), but the setup engine is pretty simplistic/basic, and had some issues and limitations that I didn't like. The price is right, but it's not exactly convenient unless your project is already using VS2008. This installer is from Microsoft and is free with VS2008. I started here simply because I'd used it before and already had an old install project written for one of the two projects. Things that I noted as negatives might not be an issue for you, and if I couldn't get something to work, it may just mean that I didn't spend enough time on it. One caveat: I spent some time with each package, but not enough to become an expert. I started doing research into install packages, and here are my results. NET, and had some additional unusual requirements: after installing, we would need to download and configure a data file that was tied to the specific user. I'd reached that point in the project that every developer dreads: it was time to build and test the installer! Actually, it was worse than that I had two projects that needed installers.īoth were Windows applications one needed Java installed and the other needed.