Anyone here using Visual Studio Installer ?

[Bendik Engebretsen]

I'm looking for a newsgroup (or some e-mail addresses) where I can discuss
problems and share my experiences with Visual Studio Installer. I'm not
getting very much response at microsoft.public.vstudio.general, but I
suspect many people in this group have started using it (?) I would like to
get in touch and share some thoughts, (evaluation against 3rd party tools,
bugs, how to's, etc...)

For those of you who are still fooling around with InstallShield (or
others), I can warmly recommend visiting

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/downloads/vsi/default.asp

right away...

Bendik Engebretsen

[Cecil A. Galbraith]

Bendik,

I've been using it for about a week now. It works well - the total install
size becomes the smallest that I've seen.

One thing that I haven't figured out, though. The installer requires a
number of files such as msiexec.exe and some dll's to work, and these files
appeared on my machine as a result of installing the Visual Studio
Installer. In looking about, I haven't found another non-developer machine
that will run an MSI file.

If you have to install Windows 2000 (or be a deleloper) to be able to run
one of the installs, the VSI is going to be of limited usefulness for quite
awhile... Am I missing something, here?

Cecil

--
CodeSoup Web Site with free sample code/tips
www.codesoup.com
EMail - cgalb...@codesoup.com

Bendik Engebretsen <ben...@techsoft.no> wrote in message
news:#YNgeKkD$GA.261@cppssbbsa05...

[Bendik Engebretsen]

I had the same question about the MSI file until I suddenly discovered that
you can actually "bundle" the whole Microsoft Installer with your setup.
This means you can run your setup on all 32 bit Windows platforms (95 as
well!). It very simple really: Just select "Project", "<YourInstaller>
Properties..." (at the bottom) and then under the "Build" tab, click the
combo "Build type:" and select "Installer with Windows Installer Loader". In
the combo below - "Package files as:" - you can also select to compress in
cabinet files, and if you do, you'll see that the "Media" combo will be
enabled. This lets you divide your installation into files that will fit on
CD-ROMs or floppys.

When you package as "Installer with Windows Installer Loader", you get a
classic "Setup.exe" file, which is just a bootstrap loader which will detect
if the Windows Installer is present, and if not, install the Windows
Installer. I tried it on a Windows 95 system, and the Windows Installer was
installed automatically, then it asked to reboot. After the reboot, the
installer launched itself automatically, and continued with my installation.

Bendik

Cecil A. Galbraith <cgalb...@codesoup.com> wrote in message
news:7tb1qe$7...@journal.concentric.net...