I am trying to deploy the setup.exe that click once creates to users through sccm due to business practices. The issue I am running into is that when I move the setup.exe out of the folder that contains the .VSTO, then the computer the setup.exe is being run on cannot find the VSTO. Is there anyway when publishing to have that setup.exe file look back at the file server that contains the VSTO?
A bootstrapper (setup.exe) just check for prerequisites before running a real installer app for installing the software. Running setup.exe separately doesn't make any sense.
There are two main ways of deploying Office applications:
Deploy an Office solution by using Windows Installer. It is used for centralized deployments like SCCM.
Deploy an Office solution by using ClickOnce.
You may find various custom installers that may embed everything into a single setup.exe file. For example, you may take a look at InstallShield or Advanced Installer .
Related
My problem is the following:
I have multiple applications that I want pack in one installer so when the user runs it, they will be installed automatically instead of installing or copying each single application.
I have a program that's already a setup file (.exe) and two .exe files which can be executed manually and do not need an installation. So what I want is:
Build an installer so when the user opens it - the .exe file of the setup program gets installed and the other applications which dont need to be installed will be copied somewhere in a path.
Whats the best solution?
I think you need a packaging programs to create an installation package, such as:
AdvancedInstaller
InstallShield
InstallAnyware
The first two of them have a freeware version. Maybe you can see if the required features are available in the freeware version.
I would suggest Advanced Installer (allows easy chaining of installs) if you have no significant deployment experience. Otherwise I would suggest Wix and its "Burn" feature (ability to chain installers in sequence). Please read the following answers for context:
What installation product to use? InstallShield, WiX, Wise, Advanced Installer, etc
Windows Installer and the creation of WiX
Wix to Install multiple Applications
Read this if you want to get going with Wix quickly
We have an Outlook addin that we created in Visual Studio 2010 in C#. When publishing, we're given an exe that does not allow for any quiet installation processes - none of the typical command switches work.
How do I generate a silent MSI instead of the default setup exe?
Found the solution I was looking for in an MSDN help article.
Deploying an Office Solution by Using Windows Installer
This is all I wanted to do - create an MSI instead of using the provided exe (which does NOT include an integrated MSI or other packages). This allows for flexible, scalable deployments without user interaction, regardless of user that is logged in to the machine.
The short answer is that it just works if you use only the MSI file. The setup.exe installs the prerequisites and then launches the MSI file. There is no good answer I can give about the prerequisites because they may all be different, but in general you just use whatever the details of the redist tell you in docs or a web search, installing prereqs by administrators etc.
It's an MSI, you publish it to the machine (I think that's the group policy description) and in fact the install is required to be silent and will give you an error if you attempt to show UI, the message being "This advertised application will not be installed because it might be unsafe. Contact your administrator to change the installation user interface option of the package to basic."
In other words when the administrator has defined the install parameters etc the user cannot change them.
I'm trying to put together an installer package that will install VS2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, and some other development tools into a single executable installer. The idea is to create something similar to XAMPP's installer that installs Apache, PHP, Perl, and MySQL in one convenient installer.
The installers for almost every program are .msi files. Are there any applications that can 'package' all the installers into a single executable? Barring that, what other solutions are there out there to perform something like this? I've looked into using a batch file with the /passive switch for each .msi so it does an unattended install, but I'd like to make it look like a GUI application if at all possible.
Many commercial setup authoring tools offer more or less support for this. You basically create an EXE or MSI installer which acts as a wrapper for existing third-party packages.
Usually these packages are added as prerequisites, but they can also be executed through custom actions.
You can find a list of setup tools here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software
Another solution is to create your own EXE wrapper which shows custom UI and handles the third-party packages.
Greetings!
I have a solution in VS2010 that defines 3-4 individual applications.
These 3-4 apps are individual (but related) components that I need to have individually installed on our production servers during deployment. I toyed with using WIX mondo to generate a multi-feature WIX installer, but found that it would be more beneficial to allow that these applications be able to be installed individually as well as via a single-source for all of them, preferably configurable to choose which to install during an installation.
I noticed that there is a WIX project type called "Bootstrapper Project" but I cannot find much documentation around it on the web, and do not know if it is a project type that will actually assist me in creating a deployment installation bootstrapper for my projects. (i.e. a setup.exe file that will install, one after the other, each project as either defined in the installer, or optionally selectable via the installer as it runs)...
what is the best method to do this within WIX, using pre-existing WIX installers for individual programs?
In Wix, the support to create a bootstrapper is through a tool called "Burn". Burn has been pushed out to v4.0 (or version 3.6). So that isn't much help.
You can use an open source tool like dotNetInstaller: http://dotnetinstaller.codeplex.com/
Here is an overview on how to create a setup installer that checks for the .NET Framework (which in and of itself is not very useful, but shows you how to work with dotNetInstaller):
http://www.lostechies.com/blogs/gabrielschenker/archive/2010/05/19/creating-a-bootstrapper-with-dotnetinstaller.aspx
Or you can follow the instructions here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429(v=VS.100).aspx
And use the Bootstrapper Manifest Generator here (although there appear to be 64-bit issues): http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/bmg
when I build solutions in Visual Studio, that generates installer files as .exe and .msi, .exe files are useful for what?
The .EXE file that is created by the installer project is a bootstrapper for the .MSI setup file. It is used to launch the .MSI setup file.
Generally, both will launch the setup program and allow the user to install the application. However, sometimes the setup.exe file will run a custom validation routine to determine if the user's computer meets the minimum requirements for installing the software.
For example, if the user does not have Windows Installer, they will not be able to launch the .MSI file, but the .EXE application will still run and inform them that they need to install Windows Installer first. For .NET applications specifically, the .EXE file verifies the presence of the appropriate version of the .NET Framework, and if it is not present, it prompts the user to download and install it.
You can customize the prerequisites that are required for your application in your installer project using Visual Studio. See these MSDN articles for details on how to do that:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429(v=VS.100).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7eh4aaa5(v=VS.100).aspx
Others have commented on the how (.exe bootstraps the .msi) but part of the reason why is that users know that .exe files are the things you run. I don't think your average user knows that .msi files are something that you can click on to install an application.
The .exe file is made for installing the prerequisites of your application.
Let's say your application uses the .Net 3.5 framework, you can tell the installer project to include the installation of the needed libraries if they're not already installed.
You may also deactivate it, so only the .msi is being created.
This page shows how to activate and configure the prerequisites setup, just uncheck the checkbox in order to deactivate it.
You also find more details on the process of Bootstrapping on MSDN:
the capability to automatically detect
the existence of components during
installation and install a
predetermined set of prerequisites
.exe files are useful for executing your programs that you've just built in Visual Studio, assuming you're not doing web applications.
Pretty much every Windows program out there is executed using files with an .exe suffix.
Installer exe files are normally just the msi wrapped in a bootstrapper. The bootstrapper can do anything, but normally its purpose is to ensure the user is running a sufficient version of Windows Installer, then extract the msi and invoke msiexec.exe to start installing the msi. Generating installers as exe's is deprecated these days, but some still do it.