Installer choices.

[JDeats]

Last year I purchased Macrovision (now Acresso's) InstallShield 2008
product to create an MSI package. Without getting into details, I'll
just say I've been very unsatisfied with the InstallShield 2008
product (stability, extensibility, cost of documentation, quality of
support all factors).

I'm not sure how robust my install process is relative to others,
during the install a Windows service must be installed and a few files
are written to windows system folders. During uninstall these steps
must be reversed.

I'd like to hear from those with experience with various installer
packages. I'm looking for an option that's well documented (e.g. if I
want the installer to execute .NET code during install, examples
should be available on-line) also I'd like to know book
recommendations for compiling an MSI package without the use of a tool
(WYSE, InstallShield, etc..).

Jeremy

[Pavel Minaev]

On Aug 28, 5:20*am, JDeats <[e-mail]:

Last year I purchased Macrovision (now Acresso's) InstallShield 2008
product to create an MSI package. Without getting into *details, I'll
just say I've been very unsatisfied with the InstallShield 2008
product (stability, extensibility, cost of documentation, quality of
support all factors).

I'm not sure how robust my install process is relative to others,
during the install a Windows service must be installed and a few files
are written to windows system folders. During uninstall these steps
must be reversed.

I'd like to hear from those with experience with various installer
packages. I'm looking for an option that's well documented (e.g. if I
want the installer to execute .NET code during install, examples
should be available on-line) also *I'd like to know book
recommendations for compiling an MSI package without the use of a tool
(WYSE, InstallShield, etc..).

We're using WiX here, and it works for us (the product in case is a
WinForms desktop application, nothing complicated, though it's a
multilingual one - the installer itself is also multilingual).

The main issue with it is the lack of visual tools - have to handwrite
a lot of XML - and that documentation is rather shallow at places. Of
course, it being a free open source product, support is essentially
limited to forums / mailing lists.