So I am trying to figure out whether I can add a custom icon to the final install file (setup.exe). Currently, the project is using the InstallShield icon as shown below:
I cannot find any field to change to customise the setup.exe icon.
Do I need to upgrade to InstallShield 2012 Express/Professional/Premier to be able to change this field? I don't want to use something like Resource Hacker to edit the contents of the .exe as this will change the hash of the file/may pose signing problems as well.
Currently using:
InstallShield 2012 Spring Limited Edition
Visual Studio 2010
Unfortunately, I don't think this is not supported by Install Shield Limited Edition. From the Flexera website product features:
Specify Custom Icon and Version Resource Properties Modify the icon
and version resource properties to match your company and product
branding.
This only has ticks for the Premier and Professional versions of Install Shield, and I think this is talking about the installer's icon.
This leaves a tool such as Resource Hacker, but as eggy pointed out, this could cause problems.
Related
I am using Microsoft Visual Studio Installer projects extension to create an installer for my app.
Works OK, but the problem is that the product name contains "ลก" character in it and the font used in the msi installer obviously doesn't support that character:
Anything I can do about that?
Some background info:
I initially developed the app in VS 2015 which had a free Install Shield Limited edition. Or maybe it was even VS2013, don't really remember... However, now I need to make some changes in the app. There was no problem with such a name in Install Shield back then. So I tried to open the project in VS 2022, but obviously Install shield's no longer an option. This is where VS Installer project comes in, but there's the problem with the diacritics...
This looks like an encoding issue. Try searching in the VS project properties for an option to set the encoding to Unicode. I don't use the VS projects that much, so I don't know if you have the option to change it not, but it might be there.
Also, if you are looking for a better free MSI packaging tool, try the Advanced Installer extension for Visual Studio. There is one for each version of VS.
Disclaimer. I work on the team building Advanced Installer.
I'm modifying a Windows installer in Visual Studio 2008 (Visual Basic I believe, what my company's currently using) and I want to change the default install "Folder" of the program (the name of the directory). I've attached an image
to show what I mean. "Folder" defaults to "C:\Program Files (x86)\foo\" and I want it to default to "C:\Program Files (x86)\bar\" instead every time the installer is run. I feel like I've gone through just about every menu/item in the install directory and everywhere I can find, done my online research, all to no avail. Any help with this or in what window/menu to look in would be very-much appreciated. Thanks!
In the File System view in the setup project, select Application Folder and then use F4 (or right-click=>Properties window). That will show you the default location. The values in square brackets are Windows Installer properties, the rest are your text.
If you want to get more up to date Visual Studio Community Edition is free and there is an installer project add-on for it that you can get from the Visual Studio extension gallery.
I have a Setup Project in Visual Studio 2010 which creates a .msi installer. I am wondering if it is possible to add some logic to check some conditions. e.g if there is my software installed yet.
Thanks,
This is done through installer properties. You can set them and check them against values. They are just like variables in code.
However, Visual Studio is limited when it comes to custom installation logic. If you don't figure out how to do what you need, give us more details.
As a side note, launching the installer for an already installed product makes it go into maintenance mode (Modify, Repair and Remove options). So you don't need to check if your application is already installed.
You need to add installer class to one of your library or assembly. In Visual Studio, attach installer events to custom action. See how http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/visual-studio/visual-studio-setup---projects-and-custom-actions/ or here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d9k65z2d.aspx
I have the following situation:
Installed my application using ordinary .msi
Run the application from the start menu
Right click on the icon in the task bar and pin it.
Now, I can use the pinned item/short cut to start my application but after I update my app using another .msi file, clicking on the pinned item shows this error:
'Problem with shortcut' - The parameter is incorrect.
I have checked the short cut and as far as I can see it points to the same directory/file as the previous version. (the new version has the same files/location).
I assume that there is some versioning/Program Files magic happening that causes this issue but haven't found any good information on the net.
Some more information:
The application is written in C# .NET 3.5 SP1
The msi is created using a Setup Project in Visual Studio 2008 SP1
I use a custom build tool to integrate the msi build and set the ProductCode and PackageCode to a new GUID for every version.
The update seems to work fine otherwise. The old version is uninstalled, the new one installed correctly.
Anyone got a clue?
My guess is the default Application ID is changing. If you intend to update this app with msi's regularly once it's "in the wild" then set your own Application ID. If this is a one time thing, then just unpin and repin it and carry on as normal.
Setting the Application ID is easy if you're using the Windows API Code Pack. Are you?
Kate
See this article about ProductCode and PackageCode: http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/visual-studio/updates-to-setup-projects/
It explains how ProductCode and PackageCode interact at install time and how to configure your setup project to properly apply the .msi as an update.
I use a Visual Studio Setup project to create an installer for some assemblies. However, the fonts the installer uses are always aliased, and don't appear to be the Windows standard.
(source: paulstovell.com)
(Note that the installer text uses aliased text rendering, but the window title uses ClearType)
Is there any way to update the MSI to use ClearType?
Well, the short answer is no.
However you could edit the generated MSI with an editor like Orca which allows to change the fonts families or sizes, but not anything close to enabling ClearType as it is controlled by Windows.
With that said, according to this it seems WIX does support ClearType. Anybody who started with VS installer eventually had their one caveat which made them switch to WIX, NSIS or a commercial solution. Yours might be the most unique motive :)