i made an app in C# with .NET framework 4.0.
what is a most minimum install solution for me?
I don't care that the solution can include .net 4 Client Profile into install package or not. (of course, if the solution impossible to including, the solution should guide a user to download framework via Microsoft website. It's better if this progress perfrom background/automatically.)
I think InstallShield is too heavy for me.
edited
Note : I can't use ClickOnce. I want to distribute a installer by single package file. (*.msi, *.exe ,...)
It depends on what you consider to be the "most minimum." If you're just looking for something with the smallest possible footprint, but don't care if it's difficult for users, you can just provide a zip file. I wouldn't recommend it, though.
For ease of use, I'd recommend the ClickOnce installer that comes with Visual Studio. It's easy for you to set up, it pretty much automatically handles updates from a web server if you want it to, and the install process is pretty much just a single click from a website. Unfortunately, that click won't work if .NET isn't installed on the client's machine, so it won't automatically install the .NET framework. I get around this by having the download site instruct users to go to the Microsoft site and install the framework.
Update
Based on your new requirements, you may want to look at the Nullsoft Installer. I've never used it, but I've seen it recommended and their website advertises:
It is designed to be as small and flexible as possible
So maybe that would be a good fit for your needs.
Without sounding like a product advertisment, our company have switched from Installshield to Tarma Installer, it's pretty cheap but not free, it is really quite easy to create, and the file project file is all XML, so it's pretty good in sourcecontrol.
You could also look at NSIS, the installer for WinAmp, there are so many choices.
You could try these too http://www.google.com/search?q=installer+products+free
Related
Not that I haven't done any searching, but the result always leads one back to the MSDN recommendations that "all will be taken care of" if you use their Publish Wizard and "publish" your click-once application. And of course nothing is ever taken care of.
Invariably I do this: I make a CD based application, have it as "Create the setup to install prerequisite components" that's the default. Do my publish. And BAM, pretty much 90% of the people who were told "here's my first test version" write back immediately and say "it didn't install" and then we view the details and it's near impossible to ascertain what in the world is the problem. Once the result was that one guy had placed the setup files so deep in a directory structure that was why it failed, this was literally found by accidental web search/lucky peek at a suggestion comment.
Seriously, there's no iron clad way for a developer to say "I can determine exactly the full list of prerequisites; as well as the minimum system for this application", so that they can construct their published click-once application ONCE and once only?
My inclination here is to "check all prerequisites" and then un-check the ones it gripes at me about; like it will say "you can't both pick A and B, or B includes A so that's irrelevant.
It's great that I can customize the list of prerequisites, but since I don't "know" that list; what I'm asking is how I determine that list?
It should be fairly easy to determine your prerequisites. Depending on which version of .net you are programming in will tell you which version they should have as a prerequisite(most likely 3.5/4 at this point). Any external libraries will need to have the DLLs packed in, as those will not be detected by the prerequisites wizard.
You list of prerequisites should be fairly obvious if your the one who wrote the program. Which libraries did you use? Include those that do not have installers, and if shipping on a CD, you might as well include the .net installer for the version you are using in code.
I've seen click-once fail quite a few different ways. One is nesting to deeply, which is typically a rare occurrence. Second is checking the network for updates. I've had issues where click-once won't install if it is set to check for updates on startup, but it can't contact the update server. You'll need to sort that one out depending on your environment. I also saw one situation where a co-worker wrote an app that simply would not install via click-once, it would crash every time. I resolved the issue by correcting some very very bad code, but the app would deploy fine in a ZIP file.
Lastly, does your application NEED an installer? Is it a large package with many dependencies and complex directory structure, or is it just a few files and folders that will happily run from any directory? If it is the latter, you may be better off distributing a ZIP file installer and being done with it. Also, do you plan on making use of the auto-update features of click-once? That is really the only reason I ever use it, and if you don't plan on taking advantage(or can't) it loses much of its appeal.
I found this particular solution. And thank you for answers, they were helpful.
For this case Visual Basic PowerPacks 10.0 was a prerequisite. I don't know why it was a prerequisite because I wrote no VB code. It may be because I chose a custom ICON image. I did try to take it out and the app then installed, but crashed.
The setup was configured to download the installations for anything it needed.
That process was happening, but failing.
We downloaded the VBPP setup.exe from Microsoft, included that with the release folder, and told those who would be installing to run that setup first and then run the setup for our app. That made it work.
Before it was clear that the VBPP install was starting, it asked for acceptance of the EULA. The "install" also looked different than from when we downloaded and ran the VBPP setup.exe separately.
I have to make a rather complex installer for a C# add-in for Word. I've been researching this for almost two days now and I still haven't found something that can do everything needed.
The main issue here is due to the constraints regarding prerequisites. They mustn't be included in the main installer to keep it small so they'll have to be downloaded.
Additionally, they have to be installed silently without bothering the user. It is ok to show a progress bar or something similar but nothing that requires user input.
After reading about the Windows Installer, Inno, bootstrapper packages and dotNetInstaller I have finally reached the conclusion that the later would be best suited for this scope. However, there's a nasty downside which I have yet to resolve: prerequisites checking.
Is there a standard way to check whether a Microsoft redistributable is installed? The add-in needs the following components:
Windows Installer 3.1
.Net Framework 3.5
PIA
VSTO
Furthermore, I haven't been able to find the direct URLs for these components. I'm wondering how Windows Setups in VS get them.
As a last resort I could host them somewhere to have them at a known location but I'd like to avoid that.
Furthermore, I haven't been able to find the direct URLs for these
components. I'm wondering how Windows Setups in VS get them.
If your using the Visual Studio Setup Project, you can embed them into the setup, and make them required for your application to be installed.
At least for the case of Windows Installer 3.1 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
Is there a standard way to check whether a Microsoft redistributable
is installed?
Checking the registry is a quick way.
I would first prompt the user about the downloads first because there would be an uproar if it secretly downloaded files without the users consent. It could also be used for malicious reasons if it were unsecure.
use this tool http://www.advancedinstaller.com/ for creating installer project it has the simple ui interface using which u can handel many comple scenarios in an easy way. U can purchase the tool or can use freeware edition
I have Visual C# 2008 Professional and have developed the first half of a C# application (console mode) with the second half in progress now (GUI).
I'm looking for an easy path to creating an installer for it. What are the steps that need to be taken to produce a professional installer?
There's a similar question here regarding the Express edition but I have Pro, and I would like as much as possible to stick with just the standard VS stuff (if you think you can convince me that a third party installer creator is much better than a VS-only solution, give it a shot, by all means).
Keep in mind that I have no interest in upgrading to VS2010 yet, even if it's a hundred times easier to create an installer. That can come later, when the revenue starts rolling in :-)
Also be aware that the GUI component of this application is a totally separate executable from the console part. The console part is a simple "open file 1, do some work on it, write file 2" type and the GUI is a fairly standard "open file, do some stuff" beast so there's no tricky or wildly undocumented behaviour happening.
Basically, I'm looking for (at least) the following:
professional looking installer.
ability to specify where the application files go.
changes to the registry to allow double-clicks on my file extension to open the GUI app with the file as an argument.
needs to install everything required (my stuff, .Net if required, and so on).
This might be a bit more rant than answer but here it goes.
If there is one thing severely broken with Windows client software it is the deployment of applications.
My experience comes from working on NovaMind - Even though I have spent weeks over the years on setup issues, I am by no means an expert in setup technology and I try to focus on our actual product whenever possible. We have used InnoSetup, Visual Studio Setup Project 2008/2010 and finally we have switched to the WiX + Tools approach.
How do you install an application nowadays?
Web Apps: Enter a URL in a browser to get to a web app.
Mac: Drag the downloaded file (same for x64 and x86) to the Applications icon on the Mac. Done.
Windows: Download the right file (user needs to know about x64 and x86 architecture), execute it. Click ‘Next’ a dozen times, wait for the UAC to show, click yes and then hope that the installer did the right thing.
I think that if Windows had a better deployment system, a sane marketplace/app store and a proper live update feature, web apps might never have gotten that popular in the first place. Of course that’s an exaggeration but I believe a lot of damage has been done to the Windows applications ecosystem by not providing a sane, usable deployment model and even now Microsoft seems to pay very little attention to this problem.
How do you update applications nowadays?
Web Apps: No need. It is up to date.
Mac: No inbuilt magic but there is a widely used and powerful solution called Sparkle.
Windows: You better roll your own because there is nothing substantial out there.
ClickOnce should have changed all of this but failed to be usable for real commercial applications.
Here is the rundown:
InnoSetup and other script based installations are simple but cannot produce a .msi file — Some companies require .msi files to automate network deployments. You will also need to have a Windows Installer (.msi) based setup if you want to get the Windows Logo certification.
Visual Studio Setup Project 2008/2010 gives you the basics easily and you can configure a bunch of things but once you want to do the unthinkable like use a high quality icon or include a changing set of files into your setup, you’re screwed. We also had to manually fix the PackageCode and ProductCode every single time we built an update since Visual Studio managed to somehow mess up the assembly versions and would leave an older assembly when updating, thus corrupting the application.
WiX is the de-facto way to create setups on Windows and even the Microsoft Office Setup is supposedly created with WiX. WiX is not simple. There are books available for WiX!
Unfortunately, WiX alone is still not a good solution. We use the dotNetInstaller bootstrapper project to ensure the .NET Framework is installed and to wrap the .msi file and the bootstrapper into a single .exe file that people can download.
With all this you are mostly fine. There are always strange cases were customers don’t have the Windows Installer installed (and thus cannot run the embedded .msi file) or where the .NET Framework installation fails.
Things we haven’t been able to do so far:
Localizing our installer!
Providing a single download for both x64 and x86 — at the moment we only create a x86 installer because we don’t want our users to think about x64 vs. x86.
Have a nice setup UI that also works with high DPI settings. I think this might just be a thing that is not supported in MSI setup.
There is a free product called SharpSetup which seems to address some of these problems and allows you to write a Winforms based UI, but SharpSetup does not come with a bootstrapper and requires the .NET Framework — you can however write your own C++ code to react in this situation.
For live updates we have rolled our own solution and after many issues it is working okay.
You might also want to listen to Scott Hanselman’s podcast episode with Rick Brewster were they talk about the setup and deployment of Paint.NET — While I congratulate Rick and the Paint.NET team on their good setup, the necessity of such a complex solution saddens me.
If you absolutely need to use .msi then I would recommend WiX to anyone who wants to create an installer on Windows, but in the end I am extremely frustrated with the deployment situation on Windows. I have wasted weeks of my time over the years with silly setup issues. With setup you can only lose. You won’t win any happy customers because your setup works but you will lose and frustrate a lot of them if it doesn’t.
Another option is using Inno Setup. It allows you to fully customize installations, where to stick files on the target machine, modify the registry, and all that jazz. If you're willing to spend a bit more time learning a bit about the scripting required to achieve the results you want, it's a very powerful tool. (fulfills all of your requirements and much more) And most importantly, it's free =)
I've been using Inno Setup for all of my larger .NET programs. When the installer runs, it checks to see if .NET is installed and if not, downloads and installs it. As well, I've modified registry and made associations with extensions like you mentioned. Including DLL's with the installer is simple as well - Inno will lump all of the required files into a single executable that takes care of everything.
Additionally, since Inno has been around since 1997, a number of editors have arisen that help make the scripting process a lot easier.
I use Advanced Installer, it is dead simply, and I use it, because of the limitations of VS.
http://www.advancedinstaller.com/
The "downside" is that for fully automatic installation of dependencies you have to pay ;-)
If you want to create your installer fully in Visual Studio, but don't mind using external tools to help you in that job then have a look at a program of mine called SharpSetup. It allows you to build GUI using C#/WinForms, whereas backend is WiX based (which in turn means using WIndows Installer).
Visual Studio 2008 has built-in setup/installer support.
Add a new project to your solution, and select the 'Setup Project' option from the 'Other project types > Setup and Deployment' category.
Have a look at Windows Installer Deployment overview, and a step-by-step walkthrough
If you know scripting languages you can check out NSIS as an alternative to VS. There's enough documentation that you can copy paste their example installer and replace their file locations with your own.
While I'm not install expert, I've used Wix successfully. It's complicated to say the least.
I don't see any of these products being mentioned that I've seen clients use successfully.
http://www.installaware.com/
http://www.flexerasoftware.com/products/installshield.htm
http://www.wise.com/Products/Installations/WiseInstallationStudio.aspx
All provide localization, file/app for double click association, Framework bootstrapping and target location to the best of my knowledge. InstallAware and Wise provide some form of autoupdate support.
I develop application in C# with MSVC 2010 Express, with Forms/WPF/etc.
Application consist of some private assemblies (maybe DLLs) and .exe file. It uses .NET 4 features.
How I deploy this application to other computers? Of course if they have .NET 4 I just can send zip of .exe with .dlls and it work. But if they don't have .NET at all (on Win XP machine)? Or maybe they have lower version of .NET? Should I point them to install .NET from internet or package it with my app or what?
Thanks
There is click-once deploy from microsoft. It automates most of the tasks, including making sure you have the right .Net version and updating the app if a new version of your app is available.
You should create a installer package. If you are using the express versions of visual studio, you can use some free tools for this like WiX or Inno Setup. WiX is perhaps a difficult option to start with, but has a lot of flexibility. There are tutorials and example projects to modify to adapt them to your needs.
http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/
This tools create installers that can check if a certain version of the .NET framework is installed on the user computer, among other conditions. You can also include the .NET redistributable in your package, or point the user to download and install it.
We try to keep deployment as simple as possible, and one of the things we do is to ensure our application is just a single executable, no support files needed.
We several steps to get there:
Make sure all dependent resource files are stored in embedded resources where possible, and not on disk
Use ILmerge to link all assemblies into a single executable
Optional - obfuscate the assembly
Optional - If some parts cannot be ILMerged or obfuscated, forcing us to have multiple files, we use Xenocode's PostBuild to link all files into a single executable. Xenocode offers a virtual filesystem to do this. This also allows framework embedding so your app will run on a clean Windows install - no dependencies need to be installed :-)
Wrap the single executable into an msi installer using WiX
Wrap the single executable into click once deployment. For this we also use a little stub launcher executable which starts the main application, allowing us to reuse the same main application executable
Create a zip file of just the single file executable for manual installation.
We the following on our downloads site:
the MSI installer - we prefer people to use this one
A zip file with the Xenocoded (single file) executable
A zip file with the Xenocoded (single file) executable including the .NET Framework
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324733
Yes, you should point them to install .NET. Otherwise it won't be possible for them to run your application.
You didn't say what type of clients they are (are you making a small app for your friends to use or are they paying customers), but whatever the case may be, I'm always completely against sending a zip file with an instruction document describing what to do with it and what folder to extract it to. As Remy said, ClickOnce is not a bad idea, but I've found it to be a bit of a pain to set up (once you get it set up, though, it works just fine). On the other hand, a Deployment project is simpler and if I were you, that would be the first thing I'd explore.
Use xenocode here
http://spoon.net/Studio/
No need to install anything.
It converts your exe to Native code indirectly and you can run anywhere on windows system.
It also has some option of adding framework inside and the total exe size will be somewhere arround 10MB + Your application exe size..
Thanks
yes! you have to give some general instruction about prerequisites to run your software and in that you can mention the Framework version 3.5 or 4.0 and other utilities you require.
please refer this document for Choosing a Deployment Strategy in Visual studio 2010 may this can help you
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e2444w33.aspx
when you package you application,you shoud include the .NET Framework
Check out Inno : http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php
It's free and pretty simple.
OTOH I've seen QTTabBar using it in its' codebase and it was literally one single text file (setup.iss). Let me see if I can find URL to their SourceForge page so you can see the source and the build ... There is it http://qttabbar.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/qttabbar/trunk/Install/ If you grab the source tree you can probably re-fit it for your app in a day.
Is it possible to deploy a .NET 2.0 application as a portable executable?
So that my program can be ran in a Flash Disk without the .NET Framework 2.0 installed in the target machine. Or maybe is it possible to distribute my program with the required .NET DLLs, so that no framework installation is necessary?
I know that there are some alternative tools to turn my .NET exe into a single native executable like RemoteSoft Salamander, Xenocode Postbuild, and Thinstall, but unfortunately I can't afford one.
I also tried to embed the dependencies with Mono's mkbundle, but it messed my program up =\ (no XP visual style, broke some controls and its functionality)
Any kind of help would be appreciated :)
Thanks.
fyi: my IDE is Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition with .NET Framework 2.0 as the target framework.
Well, other than things like Salamander and Thinstall (now VMWare ThinApp) you would have to have .NET installed if you really want to run .NET.
It may be possible to run Mono without actually installing it (not statically linking your program, but including Mono on the flash drive). I suspect it would be tricky though, as you'd have to tell the runtime about things like the GAC location.
I can't see anything in the Mono FAQ about this, but you might want to ping a Mono mailing list - it sounds like a potentially interesting and useful thing to be able to do.
No; you need either the framework installed, or the tools like you have mentioned.
You could potentially look at mono's new static linker, but that is about it...
I have not tried this myself but here's the procedure:
Make a C# project.
In Solution Explorer, inside your project, there is a line "Reference". Click the plus near it. Now you can see all the dependencies of your project. Delete all references that aren't used (delete, and try to run/build. If it is possible to do it, that it is unused. If there is an error, return it by adding it (right mouse click, "Add Reference")).
For each reference, go to Properties, and in the property "Copy Local" choose "True". For each Image, Icon... make like to the referenced.
Rebuild you project. Now in your Build/Release folder (inside bin) you will see many dll files. Those files have the information of every resource.
Copy all the files in the folder (from step number 4) into a new folder.
Go to the folder: "\Microsoft.Net\Framework\" and copy the file "mscrolib.dll" to the new folder from step 5. If you don't find this file, you can always make a search in the Hard Drive which contains Windows folder.
Now your app is portable (with the whole folder content).
-- Source: http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/392308/Csharp-Portable-Exe-File
Well Thinstall is very expensive and it doesn't work in all situations. If you want to run your app without .Net installed you might run into trouble although there are tools that do that Xenocode has a tool that can do this for you and it's cheaper than thinstall.
But if you ask my opinion it's a bad idea to use them. Better convince your target market to install .Net 2 (Which is pretty much universal these days), and then pack all of your library files into one file using a cheaper Obfuscator like tool (There's a good one from Smartassembly.)
I've used Thinstall for a long time, and I've worked on this technology a lot, so I am not shooting off without experience.