InstallShield

Luis Alonso Ramos

A lot of installers do that. I don't like it, so I just drag the window offscreen, and restar whenever I feel like. X|

Luis Alonso Ramos Intelectix Chihuahua, Mexico

peterchen

for small things, use Innosetup. It's not so much bloat, but a fixed overhead which is ok for large projects.

Some of us walk the memory lane, others plummet into a rabbit hole
Tree in C# || Fold With Us! || sighist

Stuart Dootson

Me too - especially the Norton Antivirus updater - seems like every time the bloated piece of sh*t downloads something, it wants to restart my machine, without giving me the option of saying 'Nah, not yet'. Yet another reason why Symantec are never getting another penny of my money...

Andrew Peace

I find this thread interesting reading. Open to anyone: If you took the best installation maker you knew of, how would you rate it? Say, out of 5, where 5 is the perfect installer, and 0 is the worst thing imagineable? If I gave you something that matched up to your 5, would your company policy allow you to use it? The place I work at is kinda interesting, because we have rather rradical installations that mean we have hand written installers. -- Andrew.

feline_dracoform

so i am a user, i have 3 documents open that i am working on, and your installer reboots my computer without asking me... you will not see me for dust! zen is the art of being at one with the two'ness

Dan Neely

Kill the process and be done with it.

Bassam Abdul Baki

You have anything better than VSFlegGrid? We used it in my previous company and I actually had to implement a lot of the features it offered. "If only one person knows the truth, it is still the truth." - Mahatma Gandhi Web - Blog - RSS - Math

Brigg Thorp

I've been tasked with writing the installation for every piece of software that we've written. I started about 10 years ago with Wise, which was a great product in its day. Easy to use scripts. However, as Windows became more complicated, I found that InstallShield was much better at handling it. After a couple of years using their product, now I can't stand it. The UI sucks and there is way too much complexity if you want to do anything different than their standard install format. I think for the next installer I write, it's going to be with Nullsoft's Installer[^]. Either that, or I'll go revist Wise for Windows. Brigg Thorp Senior Software Engineer Timex Corporation

Orcrist

Ah. I forgot. Yea I still do use ComponentOne FlexGrid on occasion but I tend to use Farpoint Spread more often. D.

Justin Williams

I liked Wise (give it a 3) for its recording feature that let you manually install and it would watch and give you a head start on the project. Our company's MARKETING department decided to use InstallShield (give it a 2) instead because.. get this.. the name recognition. Something about making our product look more professional, like anyone judges a product based on a fly-by installer logo. :doh: Talk about company policy in the way. Didn't like it much but that didn't matter because InstallShield was then given to another department (because it was to be so 'easy' the devs wouldn't need to use it). ;) Like another poster mentioned, InstallShield sunk the other department and we were forced to look around for free alternatives to make the product ship (supposedly temporarily). I used InnoSetup (give it a 4) like everyone else and liked it but ran into many limitations. Found NSIS (gets a 4.5) and after a couple tutorials had the thing figured out and had all the functionality we needed times 10. That was my last job but currently we use NSIS happily too.

Gabriel Graves

Installer2Go is the best I have found. Free with ads (no popups or any spywhere) or pay a one time low fee to remove ads.

Stefan Battmer

I used InstallShield a couple of years ago but always had trouble with files not being removed from the system32 dir etc. and I was always missing certain stuff I needed for my installations (launch an exe, call a dll, conditional installs (if reg key exists do something etc.)) and since then once a year i download an eval version of install shield express and still find that not all the files are removed on uninstall. However now I am building everything using the free Wix-toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix) which I think is perfect, as it's giving you full control even when it's a bit hard to understand in the beginning. There is a good tutorial to understand the basics (http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/) and for complicated stuff you can even decompile e.g. the Microsoft office setup and have a look on how they did it.

Tim Yen

I hope he is.

Thomas Freudenberg

+1 on WiX. I'm wondering why noone else mentioned it before. :confused: Regards Thomas

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aubndez

I inherited the installers for our product... We got around giving a choice to restart Windows by creating a Bootstrapper setup.exe. Have it do the bare minimum...no need to rewrite a packaging program. But ours does a little more than just restart Windows also. Then the executable calls into the individual install package(s) created with InstallShield. I've never used Inno, but you should be able to feed it command line arguments to run a package. With InstallShield, we have it set up so that you can't even run the msi packages without handing over the required arguments. Hope this helps :) Aubrey

aubndez

If you are the one working on Installers...I feel your pain. :) The place I work has a combination of hand written installers and packages by InstallSheild. I'm the Junior on the team...so I inherited them... I've never really used any other installer maker, as this is actuall the first time I've ever worked with installers, but I'm not thirlled with InstallShield. I'd give it a 2.5. Aubrey

Maxwell Chen

Gabriel Graves wrote:

Installer2Go

Cool!! Thanks! :-D

Maxwell Chen

Kochise

I do not use InstallShield anymore :) I was quite a contributor on their forum, but their installer not only bloated the size, but also the functionnalities that became non-deterministic from one configuration to another. Our hot-line became mad at users' calling for random/spurious error message and else. I now switched to InnoSetup with a great success... You just have to learn Pascal scripting instead of VB-like InstallScript. Kochise PS : Some examples of my experience with InstallShield (several pages per thread) http://community.installshield.com/showthread.php?t=133738&page=2&pp=5[^] http://community.installshield.com/showthread.php?s=61912b41c89036fcb33916e2fd433e89&postid=276712[^] http://community.installshield.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=276497[^]... PS : Some links about InnoSetup InnoSetup : http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php[^] My contribution with LOGAN (David KOCH aka Kochise) : http://members.home.nl/albartus/inno/index.html#General_Information/what_is_new.htm[^] In Code we trust !