Best Windows Installation file Creator?

installationwindows-installer

I'm not the best programmer so I found it was much easier to write a program as several separate executables, which occasionally call each other. But now I need an easy way to actually run them without writing detailed instructions like Run file one, wait until its completed and no longer in process manager before running file two, file three can be executed 15 seconds after file two has been created. Then Add a key to your registry. Etc. I figure there must be a good software out there where I can just drop all my exes in, tell it when to run them, and output one file for my clients to run. Any ideas?

Best Answer

Inno Setup is easy to use, free, open source and scriptable if you need it.

Related Solutions

Windows – How to uninstall a Windows service if the files do not exist anymore

You have at least three options. I have presented them in order of usage preference.

Method 1 - You can use the SC tool (Sc.exe) included in the Resource Kit. (included with Windows 7/8)

Open a Command Prompt and enter

sc delete <service-name>

Tool help snippet follows:

DESCRIPTION:
        SC is a command line program used for communicating with the
        NT Service Controller and services.

delete----------Deletes a service (from the registry).

Method 2 - use delserv

Download and use delserv command line utility. This is a legacy tool developed for Windows 2000. In current Window XP boxes this was superseded by sc described in method 1.

Method 3 - manually delete registry entries (Note that this backfires in Windows 7/8)

Windows services are registered under the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

Search for the sub-key with the service name under referred key and delete it. (and you might need to restart to remove completely the service from the Services list)

What are the specific differences between .msi and setup.exe file

An MSI is a Windows Installer database. Windows Installer (a service installed with Windows) uses this to install software on your system (i.e. copy files, set registry values, etc...).

A setup.exe may either be a bootstrapper or a non-msi installer. A non-msi installer will extract the installation resources from itself and manage their installation directly. A bootstrapper will contain an MSI instead of individual files. In this case, the setup.exe will call Windows Installer to install the MSI.

Some reasons you might want to use a setup.exe:

Windows Installer only allows one MSI to be installing at a time. This means that it is difficult to have an MSI install other MSIs (e.g. dependencies like the .NET framework or C++ runtime). Since a setup.exe is not an MSI, it can be used to install several MSIs in sequence.
You might want more precise control over how the installation is managed. An MSI has very specific rules about how it manages the installations, including installing, upgrading, and uninstalling. A setup.exe gives complete control over the software configuration process. This should only be done if you really need the extra control since it is a lot of work, and it can be tricky to get it right.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Windows – How to uninstall a Windows service if the files do not exist anymore

What are the specific differences between .msi and setup.exe file

Related Topic