Installer fun
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Okay, asking for a bit of advice. The time has finanlly come when we would like to move to an MSI based installer to ease deployment, and was wondering if anyone had suggestions for a packaging tool. Been using the faithful INNO setup for years, but, sadly, it will probably never be ported to create MSI's as it would mean a rewrite for the author. Any suggestions? I just want something thats easy to use, but can be customised. The packaging tool with VS seems, well pants. Been looking around and tools like WiX seem to be very complicated (I have no love for XML) and smell like they are beta software. The fact the VS plugin for it only seems to work with VS 2003 seems sounds like it does not get much love. What I remember of the big boys (Wise and the other one) 6 or more years ago were that you had to fight the thing, which I never had to do with Inno. Suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
Wouldn't it be possible to just write a parser that reads the Inno Setup file/script and then outputs a Wix compliant xml file, and then just call wix to build the MSI from that?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Techno Silliness
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Advancedinstaller[^] works a treat for me, and has the benefit of being free for the basic version. ChrisB
That looks really interesting. Thanks for posting it!
Anna :rose: Currently working mostly on: Visual Lint :cool: Anna's Place | Tears and Laughter "Be yourself - not what others think you should be" - Marcia Graesch "Anna's just a sexy-looking lesbian tart" - A friend, trying to wind me up. It didn't work.
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SharpDevelop 2.1[^] supports editing WiX setups, including a visual designer for setup dialogs. Read more about it here[^]
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I have not looked at the WiX support in VS, but what the OP wrote sounds like the VS WiX addin is for VS03 only.
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Wouldn't it be possible to just write a parser that reads the Inno Setup file/script and then outputs a Wix compliant xml file, and then just call wix to build the MSI from that?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Techno Silliness
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Okay, asking for a bit of advice. The time has finanlly come when we would like to move to an MSI based installer to ease deployment, and was wondering if anyone had suggestions for a packaging tool. Been using the faithful INNO setup for years, but, sadly, it will probably never be ported to create MSI's as it would mean a rewrite for the author. Any suggestions? I just want something thats easy to use, but can be customised. The packaging tool with VS seems, well pants. Been looking around and tools like WiX seem to be very complicated (I have no love for XML) and smell like they are beta software. The fact the VS plugin for it only seems to work with VS 2003 seems sounds like it does not get much love. What I remember of the big boys (Wise and the other one) 6 or more years ago were that you had to fight the thing, which I never had to do with Inno. Suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
To get the most out of Windows Installer, you really must know what is going on. I recently bought 'The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer' by Phil Wilson from Apress, which introduces you to what's really happening through what VS does in its deployment projects. WiX is a tool that was developed by a former developer on the Windows Installer team and now has a number of people from Microsoft and some others working on it. SQL Server 2005 setup was written with it. Office are moving to it (not sure if this is for 2007 or a subsequent version). Phil Wilson reads and answers some questions on the wix-users mailing list. WiX takes some of the pain out of working directly with the tables because the one-to-many table relationships largely become hierarchies in the XML. It also has some places where it smoothes over a complication in the MSI tables. On top of that it has a small library of custom actions that can be controlled directly through the XML syntax. v3.0 has a larger family of extensions - a few features that were in the basic schema for v2.0 have moved into extensions. v2.0 is the stable version of WiX. Votive v3.0 works with VS 2005 but generates v3.0 .wxs files, so you need to trust the unstable version.
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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Wouldn't it be possible to just write a parser that reads the Inno Setup file/script and then outputs a Wix compliant xml file, and then just call wix to build the MSI from that?
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! Real Mentats use only 100% pure, unfooled around with Sapho Juice(tm)! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Techno Silliness
That would cover the basics: files, registry entries, shortcuts, etc. It wouldn't help with the
[Code]section of the script, however, and that's where a lot of the usefulness of Inno Setup lies.
Software Zen:
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Okay, asking for a bit of advice. The time has finanlly come when we would like to move to an MSI based installer to ease deployment, and was wondering if anyone had suggestions for a packaging tool. Been using the faithful INNO setup for years, but, sadly, it will probably never be ported to create MSI's as it would mean a rewrite for the author. Any suggestions? I just want something thats easy to use, but can be customised. The packaging tool with VS seems, well pants. Been looking around and tools like WiX seem to be very complicated (I have no love for XML) and smell like they are beta software. The fact the VS plugin for it only seems to work with VS 2003 seems sounds like it does not get much love. What I remember of the big boys (Wise and the other one) 6 or more years ago were that you had to fight the thing, which I never had to do with Inno. Suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
If you are developing for .net I would suggest the built in packaging and deployment in VS 2005 is enough for just about anything, since in reality you can pretty much just copy the files onto a PC to run them. If you are developing for unmanaged apps then all I can say is that I used InstallShield for years and built up a nice righteous hatred of it that others here can attest to. Honestly unless you are doing some tricky scripting or something during setup there's nothing at all wrong with the setup and deployment projects in Visual studio.
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Okay, asking for a bit of advice. The time has finanlly come when we would like to move to an MSI based installer to ease deployment, and was wondering if anyone had suggestions for a packaging tool. Been using the faithful INNO setup for years, but, sadly, it will probably never be ported to create MSI's as it would mean a rewrite for the author. Any suggestions? I just want something thats easy to use, but can be customised. The packaging tool with VS seems, well pants. Been looking around and tools like WiX seem to be very complicated (I have no love for XML) and smell like they are beta software. The fact the VS plugin for it only seems to work with VS 2003 seems sounds like it does not get much love. What I remember of the big boys (Wise and the other one) 6 or more years ago were that you had to fight the thing, which I never had to do with Inno. Suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
installshield
You don't see a WTF in spawning hundreds of threads ?? Or using code found on places like codeproject.com in production applications ... Code that is most likely untested, or barely test, more often than not, not made by reputable developers/development groups/etc ?? .... Wow ...---WTF
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Okay, asking for a bit of advice. The time has finanlly come when we would like to move to an MSI based installer to ease deployment, and was wondering if anyone had suggestions for a packaging tool. Been using the faithful INNO setup for years, but, sadly, it will probably never be ported to create MSI's as it would mean a rewrite for the author. Any suggestions? I just want something thats easy to use, but can be customised. The packaging tool with VS seems, well pants. Been looking around and tools like WiX seem to be very complicated (I have no love for XML) and smell like they are beta software. The fact the VS plugin for it only seems to work with VS 2003 seems sounds like it does not get much love. What I remember of the big boys (Wise and the other one) 6 or more years ago were that you had to fight the thing, which I never had to do with Inno. Suggestions would be greatly welcomed.
Hi, No one has mentioned my free MAKEMSI tool, so I'll have to :-) See "http://makemsi.dennisbareis.com" Its text based, build can be automated and has an extensive manual which includes many tips and tricks. Bye, Dennis
PPWIZARD - Free HTML Preprocessor MAKEMSI - Free MSI (or other database) creation/update tool http://dennisbareis.com/