What is the best choice for building Windows installers? *

Question

I have primarily used Visual Studio 2003, and its tool for building an installer was pretty painful. Files and folders had to be added manually, one by one. I am looking at upgrading to Visual Studio 2008, and I'm not sure what its installer is like.

Also, I'm interested in installers for non-.NET applications.

Are there good, open source options? Is Visual Studio's installer any better in Visual Studio 2008?

Answer

Have you seen InnoSetup? This is general install engine. There is really nice front end to InnoSetup called IsTool. I used it in old Delphi-days and it was superb.

WiX plus its editor WiXEdit seem to be the similar pair and look pretty powerful as noted below.

There is also NSIS originally created by Nullsoft, the people who made Winamp. Now it is opened.

Ohloh does not say which one is particularly better.

Some people suggest VS2008's ClickOnce but seems to be not very good.

You can always look for a big list on Wikipedia.

< br > via < a class="StackLink" href=" http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3767/" >What is the best choice for building Windows installers?< /a>

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