If I recall, InstallShield X used the legacy setup.exe which only let you pick
from a list of MSI and .NET redists. It was very limited. I believe it was
10.5 that introduced the setup prereqs capability which obsoleted the old
ability and greatly extended the system. InstallShield 2008 or 2009 then
added
the ability to do MSI chaining and "Feature" prereqs rather then only Setup
prereqs.
Also the legacy InstallScript engine did suck royally. This was fixed in 2006
with InstallShield 12 and it's very similar to DTF now where you have an
encapsulation pattern that looks like a standard Type 1 to the MSI runtime.
I agree about the hurdle to having to re-learn MSI when learning WiX. This is
why I created IsWiX as it lets me author full featured WiX with the ease of a
full UI tool.
Oh and yes, VS Setup & Deployment projects royally suck. Evil evil evil IMO.
Christopher Painter, Author of Deployment Engineering Blog
Have a hot tip, know a secret or read a really good thread that deserves
attention? E-Mail Me
----- Original Message ----
From: Bruce Cran <br...@cran.org.uk>
To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.
<wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net>
Cc: chr...@deploymentengineering.com
Sent: Fri, September 3, 2010 12:55:10 PM
Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Bootstrapping and Burn
On Fri, 3 Sep 2010 10:31:34 -0700 (PDT)
Christopher Painter <chr...@deploymentengineering.com> wrote:
> Well said other then I don't agree that InstallShield is the reason
> people don't want to write installs. ( Although this seems to be
> supported by tweats and blogs that I read. ) I just can't buy
> it based on my experience using the tool for the last 14 years.
> Maybe I'm just hard headed enough to look past the tools faults.
I used it for a while and found it to be awful. For a start it's
expensive enough that we could only buy a single copy - that ruled out
other developers creating their own installers, and eventually caused
us to abandon it in favour of Visual Studio 2003's Setup & Deployment
project. I did try and recommend WiX but the senior developers didn't
want to learn a new language just to write an installer.
The major problem I had with IS was that it didn't appear to be
flexible: we couldn't bootstrap .NET 2.0 for example because
InstallShield 10 was too old by that point - they wanted us to update
to 10.5 (spending another $1000) or start hacking around with the MSI
tables in an editor that looked like Orca.
Around that time there were also numerous problems with
InstallShield-based installers due to the InstallScript engine needing
to be bootstrapped. All that has left me with a continuing
negative impression of the product which I may at some point need to
re-evaluate.
--
Bruce Cran
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