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ricko2001
Level 3

Need help understanding options for installing .NET 4

We want to distribute out installer in two forms, one on a CD, the other as a downloadable setup.exe file.
We have, in the past five years, always created a single setup.exe file for both download and for placement on the distribution CD media. This is what we would prefer to do since there is only one installer to test.

The .NET 4.0 standalone installer (dotNetFx40_Full_x86_x64.exe) is about 50 Mbytes. The web installer, which I am now including as a prerequisite is only about 1 MB in size. I'd really rather not include the full standalone NET installer inside the setup.exe file.


What we would like to do is continue to include the .NET Web installer in out Setup.exe file.
When this is downloaded and Internet access is available, .NET is installed from the web. (Of course, if internet is not available, the prereq just hangs fot at least, a long time. Not a good user experience.)
But when an installation is run from the distribution CD on a computer without Internet access (a common situation among our customers in the Pharmaceutical R&D industry), we'd like to have our installer automatically use the full, standalone .NET 4 installer that we would place on the CD.


As far as I can see, this seems impossible using InstallShield's prerequisite system.

I could relent and create two different Configurations or Releases- the first one being compressed. That is the Setup.exe file that we are currently using. It would continue to use the Net 4 web installation. The second release would be uncompressed for use on the CD. Being uncompressed allows the pre-req files source to be set to "Copy from source media". That is where we would put the full sized standalone NET 4 installer.

However, there does not seem to be a way to include different pre-reqs for different releases.

We're using managed-code custom actions, so we really do need .NET4 to be a *pre* requisite for installation.

Any ideas?
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ricko2001
Level 3

I just learned that Prerequisites do in fact have a Release Flags setting.

Now the only question is how to prevent the MS .NET 4 Web installer from haning when used on a system without Internet access.
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