Vb.net – Windows Service – Creating an installer Visual studio 2012 How

installationvb.netvisual studio 2012windows-services

I'm developing a Windows service in VS2012 and the setup/deployment part has been removed. So I'm not able to create a setup project. I would like to hear what you guys could recommend for a good easy to use the installer. I need to take some inputs, only strings, under the installation of the service. I've been looking at WiX but that seems a bit complex, and I only got 1 or 2 days to make this installer.

So what installer should I use other than Wix?

Best Answer

I've had really bad experiences with InstallShield LE (the one that comes with Visual Studio 2012), especially for Windows Services. The features that you need to install a service (custom actions, etc), don't come with the light version.

What I'm planning to do for the current Windows service I'm working on is to build it with Topshelf, which (amongst other things) means installing your service is as simple as running MyServiceApp.exe install. I'm sure even InstallShield will let you run your app once it's installed, and then your app/Topshelf can install the service component.

If InstallShield doesn't work for you, I've had good results before with NSIS. Simple, powerful, free, decent documentation. It looks a bit clunky.

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 In current Window XP boxes this was superseded by sc described in method 1.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)

Visual-studio – Installing a windows service from a Visual Studio Installer project

I used this article:

How to create a Setup project for a Windows Service in Visual Basic .NET or in Visual Basic 2005

Felt pretty dumb that I couldn't figure it all out until I went through all of the steps in this article. It's not a trivial exercise by any means.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

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

Visual-studio – Installing a windows service from a Visual Studio Installer project

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