I am searching for tool or software to build wizard installer to be easy to custom and have good UI view.
something like Microsoft Office / Microsoft VS or any good setup process?
Does Microsoft give tools like this?
I am not so familiar with software builds and installation.
Ideas from experts in installation field will be great
Thanks ALL.
Check out Caphyon's Advanced Installer.
There is NSIS and Inno Setup
They create Native Setup Applications, with very low overhead, and are very easy to learn with hundreds of examples
The latest versions of Visual Studio come with an installer, I'd also recommend the open-source NullSoft NSIS installer.
Visual Studio has it's own packaging tool, check it under the sub-menu of tools
I've had great success with the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolkit.
There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's very flexible. The Wix Tutorial is a great resource to help you get started.
Related
I'm looking for installation creator engines. I've checked NSIS and NDJS.
I would like to request for some additional information about them, or another tools I could use.
I'm not quite to figuring out whether they are tools in order for me to able to creator installer for several platforms
What's the state of NDJS? Both have not a good documentation. I'm not quite to able to figure out how's their state
Are both useful for .NET developed projects?
Are there any alternatives?
There is also Inno Setup which is free and amazing installation system.
I am not sure about NDJS but I can recommend NSIS and Inno Setup (see disclaimer below).
Both NSIS and Inno Setup are excellent. They are open source, well documented (yes this is true!), with large community and active development (NSIS has new release 3 days ago even during Christmas!).
NSIS is C like scripting language but a little more difficult to start with. Inno Setup is Pascal like language easier to learn.
Their capabilities are unlimited because of their scripting nature: you can do everything in them and even wrote C/C++/pascal/C# (maybe other) plug-ins if you need to execute something really special. They are useful for any Windows apps (native, .NET, plugin-s, drivers, firmware, from small apps to enterprise solutions).
To start with .net installer (Inno Setup) try e.g. this code: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20868/NET-Framework-Installer-for-InnoSetup
Disclaimer:
I tried several other commercial install system systems but none of them offered the same as NSIS/Inno Setup (for free). I use NSIS and Inno Setup daily and I recommend them as best install system available.
I am NSIS and Inno Setup professional and I develop professional installers in this systems (http://www.unsigned.sk). I also developed Microsoft Visual Studio and Embarcadero RAD studio extensions which integrate NSIS and Inno Setup into these IDEs and Graphical Installer which is skinning engine for installers.
Apart from what Slappy said I would like add Microsoft Xml type installer i.e. Wix into your list. Thought NSIS/Inno is a beautiful piece of tool to build installer system, Wix is more modern and directly accessible from Visual Studio projects.
Learning curve of Wix is a bit hard than these scripting languages but many companies are now using this Wix tool.
I need someone to point me to the right direction. I am new to Windows Installer and I have researched WiX, Advanced Installer, Inno Setup and NSIS and I don't even know the correct keyword to look for to see if they solve my problem.
What I want to accomplish is:
I have many PC software for user to download. Each of them is a separate install file (exe or msi).
What I hope to accomplish is to create a Custom Windows Installer that is able to accomplish these during installation process:
List all PC software available for user to download/install.
Allow user to choose which PC software they would like to download/install.
Download/Install these PC software for user.
Each PC software is hosted in different location from where user executes Custom Windows Installer.
Is there any solution that meets my requirement?
thank you all, appreciate your help.
You can do this for sure with Advanced Installer and WiX.
In Advanced Installer you have a built-in support for suite installations, as in the linked tutorial. In this example the applications are included in the setup package, but you can configure them to be downloaded from a URL too, during the installation. Our support team (disclaimer: I work on Advanced Installer) is very responsive so if you have any questions check out the forums or send an email to support.
In WiX there is a bundle support called Burn. Of course the learning curve for WiX is a little bit steeper, but that's how it is with OSS :)
I would prefer NSIS or Inno Setup. They are free (open source) and easy to learn.
They are script-based, so basically you can do everything. There are a lot of plugins available for them (for example, for downloading files), and you can adjust any aspect of the installer.
Create a custom page where you list the software
Selected software will be downloaded
Software will be executed
NSIS has its own language similar to C, and Inno Setup uses Pascal language for scripting.
I have an application which require .net 2 and .net 4 framework with adobe reader , i want to install them before software installation, how i am supposed to do this? Kindly please guide me towards right direction.
This is usually done by adding the packages you need as prerequisites for the main installer. Most commercial setup tools support prerequisites one way or another. Here is a list which can get you started:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software
Pick a tool and try using it to create your installer and add prerequisites for it. I recommend Advanced Installer or InstallShield. If you want a free solution, you can try WiX.
What you need is basically a suite installation. The link I included shows how to do this with Advanced Installer (Disclaimer: I work on this tool). This is a commercial tool, but it saves you from learning to code Wix/NSIS projects, as it is completely GUI driven, thus you can built your installers without writing any code.
With NSIS as your installer, you can refer to the following pages for help with detecting and installing .NET:
How to ensure a required version of .NET Framework is installed
How to automatically download and install a particular version of .NET if it is not already installed
I am writing a installer for my company's software. The specs is pretty tight: doesn't require administrator rights, good if it also include auto-update capability, have a nice UI (as opposed to the normal windows wizard UI), small and fast, robust...
I looked at Advanced Installer, which satisfy everything except having a good UI. (it shows the classic MSI installer UI which is super-duper old). We would love to have something more user-friendly.
Do you have any suggestions for installers I should look at, given these constrains?
P.S: i'm reading about Google's Omaha next, then maybe NSIS and InnoSetup / WIX...
This question is very subjective. However Office 2007, 2010, Visual Studio 2012 (aka VS11) were all developed using WiX. The software is fully open source and you can take a look at the latest weekly release for an example with a very nice UI.
Amm .. I couldn't understand if you want to develop it by yourself, or using another software, but if you do, I think that Install creator pro can be good for you.
Does anybody knows how to program modern and fashion GUI's like this example?
modern GUI
What kind of tools should I need for developing for Windows in Visual Studio?
Thank you very much.
If you are doing this in .NET, targeting Windows, I would suggest you use WPF. Visual Studio 2010 has all the tools built in to build a GUI like that. There are loads of tutorials on how to do this, I found this one in 24 seconds.
If you would like it to be fairly platform independent, targeting Linux, OSX, Windows etc you probably would like to use Qt. Qt has a pretty good editor focused on developing in C++ using cute called Qt Creator but if you are focused on using Visual Studio there is an add-in that might help you.
Edit: There is a similar question here on stackoverflow that might help you: Creating a nice GUI in WPF
If you want to develop in win-forms I suggest using 3rd party control vendor , such as Telerik or Dev-express.
Telerik's support is very good and their win-forms controls are pretty stable around now , You could download a free trial to try it out.
http://www.telerik.com/products/winforms.aspx
http://devexpress.com/Products/NET/Controls/WinForms/