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 audience of over half a million unique developers. In July '08 James left his job as Head of Development at a digital agency in London to focus his energies on developerFusion full-time.
InstallShield Professional also integrates tightly with the Microsoft Windows Installer Best Practices - a far cry from the poor implementation of this in Wise for Windows Installer. Because the program uses Windows Installer, this means you can easily create your own custom setup dialogs, and edit existing ones. The dialog editor is fine, although one thing that needs to be improved on is the amount of flickering as you select objects. Another annoying 'niggle' is the fact that you can't remove the InstallShield text which appears on every setup screen, something that Wise for Windows Installer did allow you to do.
Full control over sequences, and execution of action and scripts is provided - as far as the Windows Installer architecture allows. Multiple billboards for display during the setup process are also fully supported. Perhaps one weakness is the complete absence of any information on how to prompt for a product serial number - you need to know your way around Windows Installer to work that out! Documentation is otherwise excellent - this is integrated into almost every screen, as well as comprehensive documentation on Getting Started, ZAW Tutorial (Zero Administration for Windows), Globalisation tutorial, the Windows Installer SDK documentation, InstallScript reference and more.
InstallShield Professional, like the Wise program provides the usual Registry, ODBC, and INI file options, multiple releases and language control, but as you dig further into the programs advanced options, further power is revealed. This includes Application Paths, COM registration, file types (including command verbs), NT services, and publishing.
For advanced users, InstallShield Professional provides full control over the tables, variables merge modules etc, as well as an integrated MSI Debugger, MSI Validation Suite, and support for including and executing InstallShield scripting files within the setup.
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