right installer for .NET application

  • Thread starter Thread starter Marek
  • Start date Start date
M

Marek

Hi there, I try to make final decision on the choice of installation tool
that our team should use for .NET applications.
It is supposed to be robust (but not omnipotential) and well established.
After some time looking around we came down to 2 choices. Open source NSIS
and comercial Wise for MSI. Th eonly reason we did not include InstallShield
is that we already have a license for Wise, so upgrading instead of buying
new will save us some money.
Could anyone give me a short opinion. Is NSIS popular in .NET world ?
I apologize if this is wrong group for this type of question.
Thank you.

Marek.
 
Marek said:
Hi there, I try to make final decision on the choice of installation tool
that our team should use for .NET applications.
It is supposed to be robust (but not omnipotential) and well established.
After some time looking around we came down to 2 choices. Open source NSIS
and comercial Wise for MSI. Th eonly reason we did not include
InstallShield is that we already have a license for Wise, so upgrading
instead of buying new will save us some money.
Could anyone give me a short opinion. Is NSIS popular in .NET world ?
I apologize if this is wrong group for this type of question.
Thank you.

Marek.
Click to expand...

We use InnoSetup for our .Net setup packages. It's easy to use and
scriptable. A lot better than most of the rest we've tried...

www.innosetup.com

HTH,

Mythran
 
I'm curious, is there a specific reason why you don't use a Setup and
Deployment project?

Mark
 
Mark White said:
I'm curious, is there a specific reason why you don't use a Setup and
Deployment project?

Mark
Click to expand...

For me, I like how Inno Setup is. It allows you to create setup packages
regardless of the development language used. It contains 1 file (the setup
file) unless you write include scripts to go along with it. I can attach
this single file to a .Net project (or any other source-controlled project
in any language) in order to keep it under source control. The syntax isn't
hard to understand and ISTool (a GUI front-end to InnoSetup) makes the task
of creating a setup for an application, library, et cetera pretty darn easy.

The .Net Setup and Deployment project is more complex and yet, limited. For
example, how hard is it to get the output of the Setup and Deployment
project to contain the following:

<Static Name Of Setup> v<major>.<minor>.<exe or msi>

There may be a way, but I have asked before and never found out how. Now,
the decision was not based on that example, but quite a few similar
annoyances with .Net's Setup and Deployment projects and the features of
Inno Setup just made Inno Setup a better choice for our organization.

:)

Mythran
 
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