[Interest] Installer Recommendations

[Till Oliver Knoll]

> Am 19.02.2015 um 02:54 schrieb Jérôme Godbout <jerome at bodycad.com>:
> 
> I up vote for wix, can integrate into Visual Studio and MSBuild.

Hmm, why has no one mentioned the "reference MSI Installer" from Microsoft which comes with Visual Studio itself, with the (commercial) "Enterprise" version?

It's been a long time since I had access to it (in VS 2003 or the like), but IIRC it allowed you in a "Wizard" kind of way to define Registry entries (which are also removed upon de-installation etc.), version updates, "unattended installation" (which is really a feature of the MSI packaging system).

I don't know whether that graphical Installer builder included in "VS Enterprise" was really a "reference/feature complete" builder, or merely a "basic installer", but it did what we needed (basically covering the mentioned criteria of the OP).

And yes, WiX (Open Source - isn't it even developed by MS themselves?) allows you to do all that for free.

It's advantage: it's all based on XML "source" files which probably makes it predestined to be included in an automated build chain, where even those XML files are created automatically.

It's disadvantage: it's all based on XML, and you need to investigate a lot in reading the documentation! Even associating your application with a certain *.extension (not to mention a "Document Icon" to be used for such *.extension) might end up in a huge endeavour.

There is a graphical Wizard to get you started (by creating the proper XML text blocks for a simple Installer Wizard), but that gets you only that far.

In short: very flexible, and I guess everything that the MSI framework offers is supported - but you need to invest a lot into reading documentation (or find example code which does what you need).

Cheers,
  Oliver




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