For those of you that have found this program un-useable

[unobtainius]

Personally I feel let down Microsoft. The installer package that used to ship with visual studio did everything I required.

If you wanted more functionality then you would go out and buy a package providing the functionality you required.

For them to now ship with an inferior distribution packaging solution feels like they just don't care anymore, or have lost the expertise to deliver the fully functioning suite of tools they used to offer.

I expect a distribution building package to be fast and easy to use and create a setup package that works.

I expect it to discover the assemblies my project references and add them to the setup package.

If the setup packager lets you use a wizard to build setup projects then I would expect the final step would be to build the setup, not leave you wonder so where is my setup, has it been created, is there something else I need to do? What's going on here.

Even if you start using the building the setups by hand with this tool simple things you used to be able to do such as personlise banners, you now have to pay for.

All in all I give this tool a 4 out of 10.

I have been using Advanced Installer 9.6 without any of the problems I found with install shield, and it's free too.

[bruce_scheffler]

I few the same way as you do. I have never felt so unimportant as I do now when I try to create a new install file. (setup.exe)
I used to own InstallShield when Wise owned it and I never had any of the issues they have now. Further they were always willing to give us advice on how to solve issues even if it had nothing to do with their product.
Now...well you have experienced first hand how they treat the problem. But I bet if you bought their latest and greatest advance version they might help...

[CChong]

Thanks very much for your feedback on the InstallShield Limited Edition (ISLE) product. I'm sorry to hear of your frustration, and we'd like to help. When we released the ISLE product, we worked hard to ensure it had comparable features to the functionality it replaced. It's not identical in all respects, but our goal was for feature parity.

If you've found any missing functionality in ISLE that used to be in the Setup and Deployment project, we'd love to hear about it. Please feel free to share your feedback via this thread, and we'll submit this to our Product Management team as appropriate to ensure it receives the attention needed.

While it is certainly true that our higher product tiers (Express, Professional, Premier) contain much more robust functionality and features, the ISLE product should still provide enough functionality for creating simple, straightforward installs. If you don't find that to be the case, please provide details.

Sincerely,
Flexera Support

[unobtainius]

Including in the setup, all the third party references I have in my project would be a pretty good start.

*feature

[Christopher_Pai]

That's actually a "feature" in Visual Studio Deployment Projects that I loathed.

VS always tried to "help" you even when you didn't want it. There was no way to disable dependency scanning. You could only exclude a dependency after it was detected.

I can't count how many times I'd exclude everything only to have the build server "find" some other dependency and author it in (too late to exclude). We actually wrote build automation at one point to open the solution, iterate the projects and exclude everything found, save the solution and then build.

As for Feature Parity, from what I've seen, sadly, parity is there. For example VDPROJ always used InstallUtil CA's to install windows services. A recent Flexera Blog Article wrote about how to do this in ISLE. This is one place I really wish that InstallShield would have put installation quality over marketing upsell goals.

That said, I've written several installers for customers for ISLE and it works well. Especially when you "augment" it with creative use of merge modules. 🙂

[bruce_scheffler]

Sorry you like to do all the hard work, I for one would love the product to work as a replacement for VS.
I am pretty sure there a lot more of us than you that would love to have it work right.

[Christopher_Pai]

Oh I'm quite certain that there are many people out there that would love their installation tools do a number of things that I wouldn't want it to do. It doesn't mean that they are right and that I am wrong.

I've done some of the most gnarly installers imaginable over the last 16 years so I feel confident with my opinion.

[unobtainius]

I love it when people drop in the number of years they have been at this game.
I've have probably forgotten more about programming than most people know. Like it some adds credence to what they have to say.

One of my clients likes to say 'well I've been doing it like this for the last 20 years'. Well doing something wrong for the past 20 years still aint makin it right.

Anyway - Still extremely unlike this product and would touch it with my ten inch pole.

[Christopher_Pai]

Guys, I'm not here to start a fight. I *AM* an expert in this subject. Compare my post count to yours. Or go look at StackOverflow.com and see who the number one contributor on all things installer related is. Take a look at my profile while you are at it and take a look at my long list of clients.

I've worked on massive projects and I assure you I haven't been doing it "wrong" for 16 years. Perhaps the real thing Flexera did wrong was to bother trying to assimilate the Visual Studio Deployment Projects market. I've known many developers who use that tool over the years and it's like banging your head against the wall trying to show them the way.

[Christopher_Pai]

Joshua-

I can name two things missing compared to VDPROJ.

1) Create Merge Modules
2) Full AppSearch/Launch Condition Support

For example, VDPROJ lets you define 2 or more app searches and ( say THISFOUND and THATFOUND ) and then create a LaunchCondition such as (THISFOUND or THATFOUND )


Examples would be where I need to detect Office 2010 32bit or Office 2010 64bit or Office2013 32/64bit. The current implementation doesn't allow this natively.

[CChong]

Thanks much for the feedback! I didn't anticipate this lively of a discussion, but it clearly shows that our customers have a range of requirements that we're trying our best to accommodate. We'll submit your feedback items internally, Christopher, and welcome any additional feedback from others.

Regards,
Josh

[Christopher_Pai]

Josh,

It's basically two schools of thought. One says:

1) Creating installers should be push button easy because installers are simple and that the tool should handle dependency analysis and authoring for you otherwise it's worthless.

and

2) Requirements (dependencies), Design ( merge modules, redists, private deployment.. ) and Construction (actual authoring) is in fact a development activity and it should be the developers responsibility to properly do this. Dependency analysis tools should only be use in gathering requirements.

I fall squarely into the second camp. I don't have a problem with a tool that supports #1 as long as it can be disabled. You could not disabled this functionality in VDPROJ. Thankfully you can in InstallShield.

[bruce_scheffler]

But it should still work. I should not have to go nuts trying to get a function to work that is being advertised as working.
If it was just me not a problem, but i am not alone on some of the issues with the software.

[Christopher_Pai]

From my perspective as a developer, it's impossible to work in all situations.

Imagine a .NET application that's using reflection or inversion of control.


The design is loosely coupled so that A.EXE doesn't have a dependency on B.DLL. Instead it calls a factory and requests a class that meets an interface. It discovers that B.DLL has what it needs so it gets invoked.

In that situation it's impossible to know the dependencies are. And even if you could, how could it know that any given DLL should be deployed privately vs installed by a third party redist.

I could go on and on with countless scenarios where it's simply got to be up to the developer to understand how his application works and what it's dependencies are. Short of that it's ILDasm, Depends, Process Monitor and error logs to figure it out.

There is no easy button except the finished installer that we end up with. Sorry.

[unobtainius]

All I am trying to say is if you specifically put a reference into your project referencing a dll, or visual studio adds a dll to the list of referenced dlls, then any setup program designed to work with visual studio, should use this list to add the referenced dll to it's build.

e.g. right click on project - add reference
in versions prior to 2012 you could click the show all files button on the solution explorer window and under references you could see a list of reference assemblies.

So I'm not talking about reflected assemblies or any other reference that is so loosely coupled as to lack clear delineation, plain and simple list references.

[Christopher_Pai]

So if I have a reference to System.Windows.Forms, InstallShield should add it to the MSI?

If you'd just stop and spend a few hours coming up with a formal list of requirements and design you might start to realize that this problem is far more complicated then it first seems.

[bruce_scheffler]

It seems to me you are trying to make it complicated.
If you create a project in VS2012 you can see the references to the dlls, etc. by clicking on the Solution Explorer/Reference on the project list.
Those items must be included in the final exe or referenced by the exe when the program runs.
Installshield will tell you it cannot find those files yet it will tell you the program ran fine. And if you check the Installshield primary output list it will show all the files but some will be loaded and some wont. Yet they are all in the same place.
Stop making excuses and try this:

Create a project that uses 3rd party files. Just use the wizard that install shield uses and then build. See what errors you get.

We really do not care how many projects you have worked on or how great you think you are, in my business you wouldn't last ten minutes with that atitude. What we want is a solution or a means to help find one.

[Christopher_Pai]

Good luck then.