Is it safe to deploy as a .msi file these days? It's not directly supported on vanilla Win98 but I reckon most people will have the Windows Installer runtimes anyway, from apps like MS Office.

I ask because VS .NET has a built-in deployer that uses msi and seems to work nicely. I'd rather not have to purchase a 3rd party one.

On a related note - do most punters expect a deployment program that handholds them through the install? As my program is only a single .exe can I get away with a zipped file and just tell them to unzip it in their chosen directory and create their own shortcut, or am I expecting too much?

20thCB

I don't have the knowledge to answer your question about .msi files, but if you choose not to go with them, here's a very nice free installer: http://nsis.sourceforge.net/

Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks.

20thCB

Ditch the .msi and go with something that's a sure bet on every machine. I've been pretty happy with Inno Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) . You might want to give them a look in addition to NSIS.

To answer your last question: the easier the better. A doorknob-simple installer is infinitely better than a ZIP! There are plenty of good, free installer creation apps out there (including NSIS and InnoSetup), so that's one area where you shouldn't have to skimp.

I was originally using the VS.NET installer but found it to be quite wasteful. I wound up with 5MB of setup files for a 1MB program. In addition to the setup that it generates, it generates two executables that I assume are for systems that don't have .msi. This totalled 5MB. I also had one tester for who it didn't want to install due to some virus false-positive or something of the like. The IDE interface for creating the installer was also pretty difficult to figure out and left me constantly feeling that I might have missed a setting somewhere.

After someone here announced NSIS 2.0 is out I switched to that. Even though my program itself (CustomBar) has grown quite a bit since the msi days, thanks to NSIS it is a single 1.63MB install executable that has yet to fail on any machine. With the modern interface the installer looks great, and the scripting file makes it pretty easy to custom steps and code. The only negative thing I have to say about NSIS is that you have to specify every file in the uninstaller manually. MSI handles uninstallation for you with its database system and allows you to flag files that you don't want uninstalled. The lack of this feature in NSIS gets problematic when you have a program with several hundred files :/

I would say go with NSIS. It's much better suited to shareware titles and doesn't have the extreme baggage that Microsoft's installer does.

I'm using MSI myself because of it's tight integratino with VS.NET.. it's basically just another project in my game / engine / editor solution and it handles file / compilation dependencies automatically.

Still, I agree that it is not as self-sufficient as a single EXE created by something like InnoSetup or NSIS. I haven't tried them out however but I definitely plan to give them a try.