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]

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.

 

[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

The best solution for my needs turned out to be
http://www.advancedinstaller.com/

For roughly $400 with 30-month support contract included, I believe
Adanced Installer is a phenomenal value. There's a thin line between
praising a product to other developers and giving free advertising so
I'm not going to say anymore about this tool, but they have a free
trial download and I recommend you check it out if you are looking for
a Installer tool.

WISE and InstallShield are certainly the most popular, but the caveats
don't reveal themselves sometimes until it's too late. Acresso's model
is to charge for absolutely everything. You pay well over a grand for
their product and then everything (even certain bits of documentation,
which they market as e-books) can cost you hundreds more. They may be
idea for corporations with deep pockets able to work their relatively
high cost maintenance plan into the budget and able to send their
target development staff off to training in the tool. Once you add
everything up it, going beyond the basics with InstallShield could
cost a company $5-10k. The problem is, chances are if you just need to
stick to the basics the setup project tools provided with Visual
Studio do quite well.

For my $2k investment in the InstallShield product really the only
features that weren't included with VS.NET free tools were: the
ability to set requirements (e.g. IE 4 or above, Adobe Acrobat 5 or
above, OS version limitations, etc...). My frustration with
InstallShield came when I needed to implement customization with
Install Script and found very little in the way of code samples and a
very rough documentation of the Install Shield API (essentially NDoc/
JDoc dump with little annotation) to go beyond these with contextual
sample code you have to pay and pay some more.

The be fair, for extremely robust Installs InstallScript is probably
going to be the the most cost effective path (the alternative being
building everything yourself with Windows Installer SDK) just don't
assume InstallScript is going to be intuitive to learn or that you'll
be able to send your developers off to the local bookstore to find a
how-to guide. It's guarded by the vendor to maximize their profits off
training materials, the entrepreneur in me doesn't have a problem with
that, but the developer in me sure does.