Are "Visual Studio Setup" projects suitable for complex setups in different versions?
The application is rather large (> 500,000 lines of code) and is under continuous development. Every 6 to 10 months a new version gets released. We have multiple configuration files (INI and XML), registry keys, database migration scripts, etc. The application is in the progress of being migrated from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET. The old installer was build with Installshield. The feedback to Installshield is: Bad adaptability, bad reuse - that's why we are evaluating "Visual Studio Setup" as an alternative.
Other products we consider:
Free Solutions
WiX
NSIS
Commercial Solutions
Installshield (again...)
Wise
Advanced Installer
Is Something missing?
Solutions we don't like to consider:
Inno Setup (it just doesn't feel right)
No, no, no and no to Visual Studio Deployment projects. I've been there on "large" projects (15,000 files with thousands of merge modules and hundreds of InstallUtil custom actions because VDPROJ exposes almost nothing of the underlying MSI such as creating services). I could go on for hours about how horrible it truly is.
I have a team of four installation developers and we use a mix of WiX and InstallShield. Our typical install has nearly 100 features, 800 merge modules and 15,000 files. We deploy nearly every type of resource you can imagine including chaining third-party installs to create complete products or systems. We are able to do this for over a dozen products each building off of multiple integration, release and maintenance branches. The four of us support an organization of over 400 people with around 250 developers.
We are able to do this because InstallShield actually can give you a fair amount of reuse. You use product configurations and features / merge modules to create encapsulations of groups of files and business logic. Still, WiX does a better job (although much harder to learn and feature holes here and there that we still need InstallShield for), so we have been slowly transitioning our baseline over to WiX where possible.
Don't go there!! We thought it was feasible for a few simple installers but it has turned out to be a nightmare... At a first glance the VS setup projects look ok, but soon you'll realize the various deficiencies - meaning that you'll write a bunch of custom action code for accomplishing just the simplest tasks (e.g., service handling and installation into well-defined special directories that are just not accessible from the "nice" setup project GUI).
You can only use some very basic forms to get user input (password input is for instance not possible). There is no automatic incrementing of installer version numbers. The file handling is horrible - you manually have to pick each and every file. That is, you cannot just say "install all files in this directory into that directory" - fantastic task to sit and manually scan for new files in a directory with hundreds of files.
No, go for WiX, although the learning curve might seem slightly worse than for the VS installers - but I have regretted it many times that we didn't do that.
Related
I have three products which have their installers in .exe files.
Let us say the installers for the three three products are
Product_A.exe
Product_B.exe
Product_C.exe
I want to create a msi file using wix toolset which will install these three exe installers.
What is the best way to do this?
I want to also fail my MSI in case any of the three exe fails to install.
I am new to these so please help.
Any example would be highly appreciated
I also plan to uninstall these products once I uninstall my msi.
Thanks in advance for any help
Tools: There are a number of tools available for MSI creation. Some commercial and WiX - the open source solution. Here is a quick summary of tools. The commercial tools are excellent but expensive, WiX (free, open source) is also excellent but has a learning curve (XML text sources). Remember that a setup consultant can help you make such packages pretty quickly in most cases, but you might need the knowledge in-house. Long review of tools.
Cohesion & Coupling: You might need to create 3 different MSIs to install these products, or you could put them all in the same MSI. Here are some considerations to decide what to do. Remember to not be dogmatic but practical - what will work best for your particular case? You can allow only some of the tools to be installed by exposing features in the MSI you make - allowing only some features to be installed from a single MSI. Feature sample screenshot.
Setup.exe: There is also functionality to allow a setup.exe bootstrapper / installer launcher to install multiple MSI files wrapped inside it in sequence. WiX has the Burn component, and commercial tools have various options for the same (InstallShield Suite Projects, prerequisites, etc... - info here).
Details: As to the actual setups. You need to determine what they actually install (bullet point 3) - prerequisites and all (COM, COM+, GAC, Java, VC++ runtime, etc...). That might or might not be available to you via 1) documentation of in-house expertise (developers). 2) You can extract files from the setup to look at (check if they are MSI files already coming out of the setup.exe!), 3) install the setups and inspect the application operation with dependency / profiling tools. 4) The best is to find the old setup scripts used to compile the old setup exes. 5) You can also "capture" old setup EXE files to auto-convert to MSI. This needs serious cleanup at times from experts and it requires expensive tools - generally. See more info here. There are probably further approaches too. Developers will dump files in place, start registering them and install runtimes and keep going until things (appear) to work in order to figure out what to do in the setup (have them jot down some good notes).
Packaging Team: Note that most big companies have whole teams to take care of such setup conversion to MSI - generally referred to as "application packaging". If you are in a big company, maybe try to locate them and see if they can help (or just get them to capture your setup for you - with the expensive tool - for you to clean up - it is no picnic to clean).
Links:
A long answer on features, setup.exe launchers and how to decompose and bundle setups
Over the years our InstallShield code has grown un-manageable and messy. We're about to design an InstallShield 2015 installation from scratch for a new major release, and I was wondering if there's any way to automatically capture a set of system changes to use as a cleaner starting point for developing a new install package. Ideally, I would like to turn on some capturing software, install the oldest release from which we support an upgrade, install the latest service packs, and then apply the manual changes that will get the new release running on the system. Then I would turn off the capturing software, and it would provide an InstallShield project pre-loaded with all the files and registry entries (GAC changes, .NET assemblies, etc) that were created as part of that install. Then I could add steps to delete those that we no longer needed and do some other clean-up and refinements. Does such a thing exist?
Yes, this is called a repackager most often, in the enterprise world where sys admin and packagers prepare applications for deployment on the company machines.
Flexera has one that can create a project for InstallShield, but it is sold together with their AdminStudio solution, which is not cheap.
We (at Caphyon) have a repackager included in Advanced Installer (the architect edition) which also requires you purchase license. And of course the generated project will be compatible only with Advanced Installer, where you can configure your installers as you wish.
I think there is also a free repackager, AppDeploy from Dell, but I never used it, so I don't know how accurate it is and if you can use the results created into InstallShield or if it generates directly an MSI.
If you started looking more careful you will probably find other repackager tools, but you should know that building such a tool is not an easy task so choose carefully. Also probably only the one from AdminStudio will be able to generate a project that can be read by InstallShield.
If you already have the source projects from the older editions I would personally not try using a repackager. Instead I would go for cleaning up all the configurations which you do not understand and re-build them from scratch.
A repackager as good as it can be still has some problems. It can capture incomplete data, for example if you have a custom action that runs different code based on the OS where the installer is running the repackager will capture only its effects on the OS where you run it. On another one might run differently and have another output.
Also if your installer has prerequisites and you run the repackager on a machine where those prerequisites are installed then the repackager will not capture anything related to this, so by accident you can forget to include required prerequisites in the new package.
There is also the things like meta-information which few repackagers can detect. For example files associations which are actually a set of file and registry entries connected together or environment variables, scheduled tasks, etc...
Most repackagers capture all this data and simply show it to you as configuration files and registry entries, instead of creating the correct entities in your projects, i.e. files associations, environment variables or scheduled tasks in their correspondent views.
We are working on a big application, comprising around 100 projects (40 views, 40 controllers/models, 20 Utilities libraries). We have outsourced the bulk of the work and the deliverables come in fairly randomly.
When we get a deliverable (a project), we need to run FxCop, StyleCop, the associated unit-tests, etc, etc. before committing it to source control. To make this easier, we have mandated that every project has a solution file. This allows us to simply run an automated script on the solution file which tests it before checking it in.
My question is "Can you think of any drawbacks to having 1 solution for each project?".
Drawbacks we have already discussed include:
Additional maintenance required by developers. This doesn't bother us as we have outsourced development on a fixed-price contract.
SourceSafe bindings in solution file. This could have been a huge issue, but luckily we migrated to TFS about a year ago.
We're in a similar boat with about 200 projects, many of them common use, accross our various solutions of varying sizes.
While a disadvantage is load time, one advantage is debugging - i.e. if your code is calling into other assemblies, then it's nice to have everything in the same solution.
Also, we do keep our unit and integration tests along with our core project (DLL or EXE) all in the same solution, so even on a bare bones template we have at least three per solution.
Ultimately I'd say the largest advantage of a common solution boils down to cross-project debugging, IMO. - But I would never just toss them together unless there was at least this, or some other compelling reason.
On a side note - we do not allow a project without a solution for the reasons you noted above (running FxCop, etc.) plus Continuous Integration. One disadvantage of a large solution with several projects is build time - but it does help to know if messing with a component ended up breaking an unrelated solution/project.
We did discover one drawback in the end. All our projects are in Visual Studio 2008. If we want to upgrade one project to Visual Studio 2010, we realised we would almost certainly need to upgrade every other project (as they are all, directly or indirectly, either dependent on, or depended on, each other).
Are there any limitations that I might face when using VS Setup Projects?
I plan to use them, but am not sure if this would be a good idea.
Well, in a more advanced setting: VS Setup Projects cannot be automated, e.g. you cannot put your project and the VS Setup Project on a build server and have them built automatically. This might not be an issue for a smaller shop or a single developer, but for a larger enterprise-level development environment, this alone can be quite a killer criteria.
In order to get around this, we use WiX for our setups - more work once up front, but works nicely with continuous integration.
Marc
They are OK, if your starting from scratch I would say look into WIX, or even pony up the cash for Install Shield or one of the other commercial ones, would save you time and money in the long run.
Builds can be very slow, especially if you have a lot of binary files. I have a project with a lot of product images that get packed into the install package, this takes a LONG time, even on a fast machine.
Visual Studio Setup projects lacks a number of key features that Windows Installer Provides. Most notable of these is the 'Feature' feature that allows you to setup several tools that the user can choose to install or exclude. As already recommended, use WiX or a 3rd party full-featured installer tool.
It depends on your project I suppose. It used to be a pain to use to set up web projects, but I think there is an addin now that makes creating a web app setup a lot easier.
More limitations...
There is no way in setup project to perform validation on data that has
been provided by the user on the UI dialogs (acquisition phase).
There is no way to designate a custom action to run with elevated
privileges(System account).
There is no way to make your custom action execute during UI sequence.
I need to create an install for my app that executes the following actions:
Copies files
Writes registry settings
Registers a windows service
Writes an XML app.config file (based on user supplied info during install--a connection string)
Executes SQL scripts against a remote database (connection info obtained in #4)
Installs and registers a COM dll
Adds entry to Control Panel>Add/Remove programs for uninstall
I don't need any fancy logic to allow the user to customize these steps--I can hard-code them with user-supplied info injected where appropriate.
I looked at Wix but found the documentation and examples don't line up well with recent releases.
I also looked at NSIS but found support for writing XML to be too limited (the plugin for this can only handle strings up to 64 bytes).
I initially brushed off the VS2005 built in Setup project as incapable of handling these tasks but I'm ready to reconsider after stumbling with what I thought were better options.
Any suggestions?
I would still recommend looking into WiX a bit more. We use it to do everything but #6 on that list and while there is a small learning curve. We've been using WiX v3 for almost 3 years, and I haven't found too many places where the docs/tutorial is that far out of place. And usually where it is its because they cleaned up the syntax and made it better.
Also, as of the next release of Visual Studio (2010/Rosario) WiX is being build directly into Visual Studio, I'm not sure if in parallel with the current Setup Projects or replacing them completely.
A Visual Studio Installer project can do whatever custom code you want; wouldn't see why any of your requirements would be a problem.
I have used Visual Studio (2005) and Wise and can recommend both. You didn't mention if the tool had to be free, and if so that rules out Wise. Nevertheless Wise has a dead easy learning curve and is very powerful and well documented. I have had a few weird things happen to me with Visual Studio. One time I had to delete my project and start over (possibly due to stupidity on my part - never figured it out), but overall I have been using it for a couple years at my current job and it works for me.
You can use just Visual Studio and Windows without commercial tools to achieve what you need.
First, check out the answer to create a single installer file.
Then, you can research how to create a Custom Action class that can perform registry, read/write files and register COM dll's separately.