[Interest] Installer Recommendations

[Jérôme Godbout]

The Visual Studio .msi build-in solution was deprecated years ago, but
returned as an extension based on install shield limited edition. I would
stay away from that for the time being and use the Wix extension instead
(stable and not limited).

The extension:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/04/17/visual-studio-installer-projects-extension.aspx

The Brian Harry's blog explain:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2014/04/18/creating-installers-with-visual-studio.aspx

I'm curious if anybody is using the Qt framework and could share their
experience with it? does it output a real .msi or just an .exe that perform
an install with a progress bar? Sorry never used it before, how does it
gather the files and lib? That could be a good alternative if it can
support bootstrap under Windows.

Jerome

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 10:06 AM, Till Oliver Knoll <
till.oliver.knoll at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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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