Custom setup project

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VS2010

Dear Friends,
I would like to create an setup.exe which will install all prerequisites if necessary i define in it. But this will not contain my application. The prerequisites are the following-
1. Windows Installer 3.1
2. .Net Framework 4.0
3. Microsoft report viewer
4. Fonts and
5. Custom culture.

Is it possible at all?

Posted 23-May-13 19:59pm

Saumitra Kumar Paul

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2013-05-23T20:55:00

Solution 1

Absolutely. Actually, Microsoft is in the process of deprecation of setup project template and obsolete Setup project type, which is not supported by MSBuild. What to do? I highly recommend Windows Installer XML toolset (WiX), which is fully wrapped for MSBuild and provides, among many other things, great integration with Visual Studio 2008 to 2012. This way, the complete project build from source code to the setup can be done both in Visual Studio and batch mode, from the same source solution.

This toolset is an open-source project, under CPL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Public_License[^].

Please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiX[^],
http://wixtoolset.org/[^].

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSBuild[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0k6kkbsd.aspx[^].

—SA

Posted 23-May-13 20:55pm

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov

Updated 23-May-13 20:57pm

v2

Comments

Saumitra Kumar Paul 24-May-13 10:00am

My intention is to make a custom prerequisites which will contain some other prerequisites. WiX will do that for me?

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 24-May-13 10:16am

This can be a bit more difficult then other things, but as far as I know, yes.

At this moment, I only know how to make a .NET platform a prerequisite, and this is because I simply used one of the WiX extensions (this one is bundled with WiX). But I saw a documentation chapter explaining deployment of the platform redistributes with the application; and another chapter explains other prerequisite.

Besides, if you need to check some non-standard condition related to prerequisites, there is an embedded construct for finding data, which includes finding something in file system and in registry. So, you can perform a condition checkup on low level.

Actually, WiX extensions, just those already bundled with its installation, include some important features which would require totally custom actions in different installers. In particular, I recently found firewall extension which let you to open a Windows firewall exclusion for the product you install. But you can also add your own extensions:
http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/extension_development_simple_example.htm
http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/extension_development_intro.htm

—SA