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 :)
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 building a piece of software and looking around for an installer system in order to deliver it to the final client.
So far I have found many such as Inno Setup, InstallShield, and then Nullsoft's NSIS.
But during my research it came to my mind that Visual Studio has a very fancy one and very pleasant to the eyes. I'll attach an image in the post.
Do you know what system they use?
Thanks.
Image Credit: http://www.lahey.com/docs/lgf13help/LFGSInstallingVS.htm
After some research I found one, a system called Advanced Installer, they provide a rich installer with a lot of customizations, the visual studio installer uses the Surface UI theme.
Link: https://www.advancedinstaller.com/gallery.html
Motivation: I miss MDI in Visual Studio 2010. In long term the best solution would probably be to have it back by Microsoft. (You can vote for this at Microsoft Connect.) However, even if Microsoft might decide to have it back, it will probably take a few years.
I am therefore exploring the alternative meanwhile. Making the source window floating is a step to MDI, but it has nasty implication of the window being always on top of everything, including tool windows.
Would it be possible to create an extension which would could allow my to make some floating windows not always on top? How should one start in creating such extension?
Or would it be perhaps possible to modify the windows ordering by external application, perhaps something similar to Spy++, but with the ability to modify windows properies or send window messages as well?
This is a bit related to Visual Studio 2010 - Semi-Transparent Floating Windows - any utility which could do that could probably be modified to do this as well.
As mentioned recently on Connect web site, recent Pro Power Tools should have an option for this, called "top-level floating windows".
That said, I already have the version "10.0.20214.15" installed (which is most recent as of writing) and there is no such option available. No such option is also mentioned in Pro Power Tools Revision Notes.
However, this gives me a hope this extension might add this option later.
I have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate installed. It includes a lot of features that I rarely use, mostly around Team Explorer and Architecture and Modeling Tools. These things have a ton of commands and menus and context menu items that really clutter my display and probably slow down VS launching etc.
Is it possible to deactivate these components without uninstalling Ultimate and installing Pro instead? I do use these components on rare occasions and don't want them completely gone, just temporarily disabled.
I looked at the installer's "change" options, and it only has high level options like "C#" and "Visual Basic", nothing about the modeling tools. These components also do not show up in the addins or extensions lists.
(I'm fine with a hacky solution, like renaming a folder or editing an XML file.)
Adam Driscoll to the rescue.
http://csharpening.net/?p=640
He wrote a tool called VSTweaker that does exactly this.
Is there any free install system with a GUI interface? I found one - Advanced Installer, but free edition is too limited, I even can't show EULA. Other free tools like NSIS, WiX... are scripting only. I got no extra time to dig into new scripting language, or whatever time consuming activities.
Currently I'm using default Visual Studio deployment system. But it is impossible to make it overwrite any previous installation regardless deployment Version. (Am I right here?)
So I wonder is there free GUI applications for building an .msi deployment except Advanced Installer and VS Deployment system?
We're using HM NIS EDIT: A Free NSIS Editor/IDE
http://hmne.sourceforge.net/
It basically displays a wizard to create the NSIS script.
You should take a look at InstallJammer. It's free, open source, and I think you'll find it can do anything you need.
Votive is a wizardy front-end to WiX that plugs into Visual Studio. Depending on the complexity of your solution, you may still need to edit the wxs manually, so this may not be what you need.
We use InnoSetup and although this uses scripting, it's pretty simple and a special GUI front end is also available.
Your assumption that MSI files created through VS setup projects cannot update previous installations is not correct. To enable that functionality, you will have to increment the version number each time you build a new setup (only the first 3 digit groups are relevant, so 3.2.0.0 and 3.2.0.1 make no difference).
At the same time you will also have to specify a new product code (VS will ask you to do that when you change the version number).
Last thing is to leave the UpgradeCode the same through all versions that you build (unless you want to have parallel installation of different versions).
Maybe this is not relevant yet, but with Visual Studio 2010 you can use InstallShield Limited Edition as described in the announcement on top of http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformssetup/threads.
You can try this out already with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.
Do you know Nullsoft Script Install System and IZPack? They're both free and easy to customize.
EDIT: IZPack requires JVM.