Think the problem also comes from the tools for creating installers: The MSI based IS, Wise and VisualStudio Installer just try to say to the people " Oh setup creating is very easy. Just some clicks here and you're done". What happens below on MSI nobody tells. For the core concept of MSI and a description of the technology there are few ressources available: MSDN, a very old english book, three german ones from Andreas Kerl (fortunately I understand them) and that's it. WIX (from my point of view) is the tool offering the best approach for core MSI creation. But it lacks a good bootstrapper, setup prerequisites and, for good installers, needs a deeper understanding of MSI technologies. And has some other problem: somebody making cash out of it and therefore being interested in spending much more manpower in it. But ok that's the problem of setup generation in general: It's a niche market and so only a limited manpower is spent in tools for that. And specialists understanding the technologies are not as common as c# developers ;-)
The classical script based installer technologies like NSIS seem also offer a very quickly created setup.exe and so appears to be very easy at first glance. Then there is the "It works on my machine" aspect. AppDevs see the product configurations working perfectly in their environments. So in their mind it could not be too complicated to run them on other computers ? Or questions like: Other configurations, other languages, corporate network configurations where Installing an SQL server might be a nightmare ? Customer Support ? I unterstand why AppDevs might think installer creation is very easy. If you discard the aspect of reliability and robustness it also might be... For doing a good job where your customers won't call the technical support and setup is becoming a nightmare there is needed much more than these "5 minute installers". In my oppinion the only way to react on this thinking is to give the application devs a closer view into setup developement or even involve them into this process e.g. in creating wix fragments for their components. Even if you run agile this is a more and more common use case and also needed by the developement process. Tobias 2010/9/3 Bruce Cran <br...@cran.org.uk>: > On Thu, 2 Sep 2010 15:49:27 -0700 (PDT) > Christopher Painter <chr...@deploymentengineering.com> wrote: > >> >> I agree with you Bob except for one problem. I've found so few >> setup experts who also have the broader application development >> experience. Too few developers want to specialize in this space. > > I get the impression it's more that developers think Setup is easy, > that it's a point-and-click job that takes 5 minutes. Having had a > colleague recommend InstallShield over WiX (and end up using Visual > Studio after realising only a single developer could use IS) due to it > having too steep a learning curve people seem far too unwilling to > believe that MSI is a technology you should learn - as long as the MSI > package installs on the developer's machine the job's done. > > -- > Bruce Cran > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by: > > Show off your parallel programming skills. > Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd > _______________________________________________ > WiX-users mailing list > WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net Dev2Dev email is sponsored by: Show off your parallel programming skills. Enter the Intel(R) Threading Challenge 2010. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-thread-sfd _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
