I am looking for a very simple update tool that can be sent out to various sites and update their applications and database.
I need the tool to be configurable by non developers. I.e. support staff.
The tool will need to be able to copy DLL files into the program location.
It should be able to find the program location, and read in the configuration file to find the database location and connection details.
It should be able to update the configuration files.
If this tool can support roll back it would be an added extra.
I am not looking for a tool like install sheild etc. as this will require a developer to use.
Open source projects, freeware or commerical applications are all acceptable.
If you have any idea, tips or suggestions they are all welcome.
This is the classic use case for having an installer for your application. The installer will copy your DLLs etc into a folder. You can then author updates or patches which can do an update of your application with newer files.
I'm not sure what you mean by "developer use". Do you mean a developer would have to create the installer project? If so, that is not really true. but yes, they would have to learn the tool is it is support you want authoring your install/updates.
There are some free tools to build windows installers. Wix is one and Inno Setup is another.
As far as updating SQL databases, Red Gate's packager is pretty simplistic. It does nothing more than wrap an update script into an executable. You can do this on your own of course if you have a tool to create a change script. The problem here is that the target database must always match the one you generated the change script on.
We use DbGhost PackagerPlus. This tool actually bundles the compare engine so that the target database can be any previous version and it will still be updated. The packager call also be called from the command line so you can run it from your installer.
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 am looking at making an application more modular and accessing dlls so that I can change them if the client was wanting different functionality.
I know how to create the dlls and reference them, but I am trying to find a way to create an executable that will install a different version of a dll into the required application folder. I want to avoid having to put the new dlls into the original project and build a new install file and I want to keep things simple for the end user.
Currently I am using visual studio 2010
You could create MSI files for each of your dlls and use the standard installer process to update the dll. It is also possible to write an exe that downloads and extracts which will have an arbitrary amount of logic (licensing, download location now and then...).
A combnation of both might seem an interesting thing. A bootstrapper downloading msi files and silently installing them. You could have advanced features in the installer while having the freedom to decide what and when to install on your own.
Technical aspects popping into my mind: files in use may not be changed and if you change the interface theunchanges main program won't be able to use the new library.
It seems you're searching for a plugin architechtecture, you might want to look at MEF or Unity to perform the compositiom, but that is more a side comment.
There are few SO thread available on this great website. You should explorer them and try the best way to implement whatever situation you have..
Check these reference links:
from: Creating a patch to upgrade .NET application
If you already use a a VS Setup Project you can deploy the new version
of this project and it will upgrade existing installations. Have a
look at the setup and upgrade ids. The stop and start of the service
can be done by custom actions that can be defined in the project and
will be executed i.e. when your setup is committed or rollbacked etc.
Patch development in DotNet
How to make Patch-able/Update-able application?
create patch file using .net windows application
Note: Ref this For clickonce how to build a patch for existing installer
I'm developing an open source C# application. For awhile now, I've been using a basic .NET installer I coded myself. However, with a recent change, that is no longer practical for me, as I'd have to add a large number of files to the installer - and they may change with each release. A ZIP file is also not practical.
I've done some checking online, I see a lot of MSI, ClickOnce, Self-extracting ZIPs, and (imo the most promising) the NSIS system. None of them seem to exactly fit my needs, so I'm looking for advice on which system to use.
Actual installing of my program is very simple. Basically, I just need to copy the bin\Release directory (and all subdirs) to the client's computer. I've been achieving this somewhat ad-hoc, by embedding every file in my .NET installer, and maintaining a file table of what goes where.
Unfortunately, I just localized my app. I now have 30+ .resx files (Which are compiled to dlls and placed into MORE subdirectories by Visual Studio) and, obviously, it's impractical to add 30+ folders and DLLs to my installer. Hence why I'm on this search.
There's also a few other requirements:
The installer should search predefined directories for a specified .exe. (My app is designed to be a drop in replacement) If the .exe is not found, it should prompt for its location
The installer should verify that "OldApp.exe.bak" exists. If not, it should rename "OldApp.exe" to "OldApp.exe.bak"
The installer should update files. Ie, if "Culture.de.dll" hasn't changed, the installer will leave it alone.
The installer should work with all Windows versions of all .NET IDEs (VS, SharpDevelop, Mono, ect) but does not need to work on other platforms.
When I build the solution, the installer should be automatically regenerated. In other words, it should be run-able for by "Post-build" section.
The installer generation must be able to be added to a source code repo. This is so that anyone who downloads the source of my app can compile the installer as well.
Sorry for the long post, I figured it was better to post more than less.
I'd recommend SharpSetup. It combines WiX and C# for a pretty flexible implementation. Not much I've found it can't accomplish.
We use WIX extensively: http://wix.codeplex.com/
You may have to customize your installers with some exit routines to do things out of the ordinary, but there are hooks in Windows Installer framework that let you do that.
You can put these definition files (XML) in your source control, and you can configure a build to execute the installation. However, anyone that gets your source would need to have the WIX utilities installed.
I would recommend NSIS. From my experience any installer feature that I have required has been covered in NSIS documentation or community examples. I can't comment on NSIS integration with Visual Studio as I use NSIS integrated with my Jenkins build server. There appears to be a free Visual Studio Add-In called Visual & Installer which provides NSIS integration with Visual Studio. I have not personally used it but it appears to be currently actively developed so might be worth checking out.
WIX is a good one. According to Wikipedia, it is used by Microsoft to produce installers for some of their own products.
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.