InstallShield
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Inno all the way. It's too bad you spent money on a lemon but you really I would at least look at Inno Setup. Flexible and Free (but I am sure he appreciates donations). I went through the same thing with ComponentOne. With the exception of Reports I dropped all their stuff even though I dropped around 600CDN on it. Chalk it up to lessons learned the hard way. My best suggestion for the future is drop by the CP lounge and ask which Tool to use for what purpose and you will get a great list of products to examine. Many free. For example if you ask about modelling you will probably find a ton of endorsements for Enterprise Architect over Rational Rose just on the basis of 'best bang for buck'. Good Luck with your install. Cheers, David
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Does anyone else here use InstallShield to build install packages? I use the Express edition, and it's a very nice program, but I have to say that the install programs it creates are extremely bloated in size! It does offer you the choice of using their compact engine which produces an install program around 1 MB for a small program, but the compact engine has very, very limited functionality. The standard installation engine produces an install package of 5 MB + for even a very small program. This is very frustrating because my clients don't like such a huge installation program. ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸
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
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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.
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.
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Maxwell Chen wrote:
I hoped it to directly restart Windows without giving users a chance to let choose YES or NO, but just [OK] to restart.
You're joking... right? :~
Now taking suggestions for the next release of CPhog...
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.
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Does anyone else here use InstallShield to build install packages? I use the Express edition, and it's a very nice program, but I have to say that the install programs it creates are extremely bloated in size! It does offer you the choice of using their compact engine which produces an install program around 1 MB for a small program, but the compact engine has very, very limited functionality. The standard installation engine produces an install package of 5 MB + for even a very small program. This is very frustrating because my clients don't like such a huge installation program. ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸
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.
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Maxwell Chen wrote:
I hoped it to directly restart Windows without giving users a chance to let choose YES or NO, but just [OK] to restart.
You're joking... right? :~
Now taking suggestions for the next release of CPhog...
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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.
+1 on WiX. I'm wondering why noone else mentioned it before. :confused: Regards Thomas
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Michael Dunn wrote:
Inno and
I once made an installer with InnoSetup. I hoped it to directly restart Windows without giving users a chance to let choose YES or NO, but just [OK] to restart. But the only outcome I could make is a message box for [restart now] or [restart later]. Do you have any idea how to do this? Thank you.
Maxwell Chen
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
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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.
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
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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.
Gabriel Graves wrote:
Installer2Go
Cool!! Thanks! :-D
Maxwell Chen
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Does anyone else here use InstallShield to build install packages? I use the Express edition, and it's a very nice program, but I have to say that the install programs it creates are extremely bloated in size! It does offer you the choice of using their compact engine which produces an install program around 1 MB for a small program, but the compact engine has very, very limited functionality. The standard installation engine produces an install package of 5 MB + for even a very small program. This is very frustrating because my clients don't like such a huge installation program. ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸
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 !
