Visual Studio Installer
A free program from Microsoft, the Visual Studio Installer allows
you to take advantage of this new technology for applications developed using
Visual Studio. This program integrates with Visual InterDev,and is ideal for
creating simple installations, with out costing the developer anything. It also
provides a useful utility for importing Visual Basic projects, effectively making
it possible to create a professional installation within a few minutes. We'll
show you how here.
The Visual Studio Installer is available on the Windows 2000 Readiness
Kit, which you can order for free from here.
Once you have installed the Visual Studio Installer (from here
on referred to as VSI), run the program. You will then be greeted with the standard
Visual InterDev New Project dialog. Click the Visual Studio Installer Projects
under the Visual Studio folder, and create a new Visual Basic Installer Project.
You will notice there is also an Empty Installer Project, which you could use,
but it is usually far quicker to let VSI to select the correct components your
application needs for you.
For this we obviously need a VB project. I recommend you just
create a quick VB application that does absolutely nothing for the moment! Don't
forget to compile the project to an EXE file. When the wizard starts, select
a Visual Basic project you want to create a setup program for.
Below this path, you then have the choice whether to create an
Installer or a Merge Module. An Installer is a stand-alone installation
for an application, where as a Merge Module is an installation for a shared
component. This can then be used in another Installer project that requires
the component. In this case, leave the Create Installer option selected, and
click Finish.