The visual studio installer is capable of self-repairing installations, is fully integrated with W2k and NT 4.0 (if you install the installer!). For simple things, it isn't hard to use.

Links

• MSI Documentation -- Who knows how long this link will be valid. Go to the top level documentation tree for MSDN, then Platform SDK, then Management Services, then Setup, and then Windows Installer.
• Visual Studio Installer Home Page - Again, who knows how long. Go to the Visual C++ home page, then click on Downloads, and scan the list for the Installer.
• Visual Studio Installer Documentation -- Again to find this guy go to the MSDN library home page, then look at Visual Studio 6.0 Documentation, and then Component, Design, etc., and then Visual Studio Installer.
• Windows Installer Info Site (non-ms)

Getting Started

• You must have Visual Studio Enterprise Edition installed before you can install the 1.1 installer.
• You use Visual Interdev to create your installers.
• Once you've started InterDev, Create a new Project, and select an Empty Installer as your project type.
  • It is under the Visual Studio folder, and then in Visual Studio Installer Projects folder.
• Before you go any future fill in the Properties for the installer. Do this by right-clicking on the project name in the Project Explorer window (located on the upper right of my screen, at least).
• Next, add the files you want installed. Right click on the Files icon in the explorer window, and select Add->Files. Select all that you need. Note that the InterDev doesn't actually import the files at this point, it just stored relative paths (if it can) to their location. This is nice because you can put the project files into Visual Source Safe or cvs and extract them on a second machine and still have the installer builder work.
• Make sure they get assigned to the proper place in the file tree.
  • Do this by double clicking on the File System icon (under the Target System icon). Open the Application Folder and feel free to create new folders under it, and add them, etc.
  • Application Folder will appear under the Program Files directories by default.
• Next add short cuts and Registry items as required. When adding a registry item that needs to refer to a filepath, you can use attributes like [TARGETDIR]. For example, if you needed to refer to the file bogus.exe that was located in the applications folder, then you would enter [TARGETDIR]bogus.exe. Note the lack of a "\"!
• Adding COM objects (dll or exes) is a bit more tricky, and is left as an exercise for the reader (hint, I think you use the Associates to do it). Check out the Online Help for more help. :-)

As an example, I've got a zip file here of an installer project that installs a utility that will convert a PDF file to a Palm DOC file (so it is readable on a Palm or Visor handheld). It adds a new command to PDF files (assumes that Acro is already installed!). It is really simple!!

Notes

• Installing a WSC in a real pain in the butt. Usually, you want to run the regsvr32 utility. While this is possible from most full blown installers (using a Custom Action) the Visual Studio Installer 1.1 does not seem to support them (as far as I can tell). In short, you are forced to write the registry entries yourself. This is painful, but totally possible. For an example, look at the Visual Source Safe database we maintain here at UW, in the VSS Utils project. It installs a few WSC components, some stuff in the Programs Menu (even a help file, ack!). This is the most sophisticated installer I've written to date.