I have moved from Wise to InstallShield 2011 and I'm looking for some best practices help so I set my projects up correctly. I am using Visual Studio 2010 to edit my InstallShield project.
Coming from Wise, I have always had a small setup.exe that called the setup.msi. The setup.exe did my checking and installation of prereqs. With InstallShield, I can't seem to figure out how to do this. Is it a standard practice still to have a small exe call the msi? If not, this is fine. I just want something or someone to point me in the right direction.
If I create a setup.exe and force my application to self heal, it can't b/c the msi cant be found. Is the standard practice to cache the MSI locally in the local app data folder?
I'm really just trying to find out what do I need to release to the public that will cause the least amount of problems. If it's setup.exe with all my files compressed then do I cache the MSI somewhere and leave them there forever?
The install is about 80mb. It will be downloaded from an internet
These sound like options you can control in the Releases view. There you can choose whether or not to create a setup.exe, and whether it should cache a copy of the MSI which it may carry (yes, cached MSIs do typically get left behind forever). If you go through the Release Wizard, you can also set this up to download the package like you describe.
