Visual Studio Installer

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.

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About the author

James Crowley

James Crowley United Kingdom

James first started this website when learning Visual Basic back in 1999 whilst studying his GCSEs. The site grew steadily over the years while being run as a hobby - to a regular monthly audien...

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