I have a windows application written in Visual Studio 2005 with C# whose main dependencies are .NET Framework 2.0, Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 Management Objects (SMO). I'm in the process of preparing my application in order to submit it for Vista Certification but as the majority of my customers will be running XP I'm also hoping to create a single installer that will work with both XP and Vista.
Having not used InstallSheild for many years I'm looking for some guidance, from any kind souls out there, on the ideal way to setup my project.
If you're looking for Vista Logo Certification, a Basic MSI project is the way to go. I'm not aware of any requirements for it which would hurt the behavior on XP, so that shouldn't cause any problems. Be sure to see the ISICEs which can assist in readying a package for the certification process.
I think I'm finding my project confusing to setup as the IDE keeps crashing on Vista (http://community.macrovision.com/showthread.php?t=177717) so I installed IS on a clean XP virtual machine. The trouble with that approach is that IS then doesn't automatically detect my dependencies. My ideal is to run IS on my Vista machine but I just can't get my project to build without IS crashing 😞
For C# dependencies, you'll need to make sure that the .NET framework is also installed. I'm not sure how much more you'll need in terms of the actual dependency libraries, and whatnot, for Crystal Reports and SMO to be detected. However I also think you need to include the Crystal Reports merge modules directly instead of just through dependency scanning if you want to be able to distribute them correctly.
