Developing and refining your code is an important part of building your application. Once it’s built, you need to deploy that before your customers can start seeing the benefits of using the application. For many applications, the most reliable way to deploy is to build a setup project that packages your application’s components into an easily installable package with a familiar interface for your customers.
Today you can use the Visual Studio Installer project template to create a setup project; however, we have heard from our customers that they need more. They need capabilities such as the ability to build using Team Foundation Server, a simpler, more modern developer experience and most importantly a runway to advanced deployment capabilities that scale along with their applications.
To address this feedback, we have partnered with Flexera, makers of InstallShield to create, just for Visual Studio 2010 customers, InstallShield Limited Edition 2010. This is a Visual Studio extension you can download and use today to build Windows installer-based deployment packages for your application that can be deployed on the Windows platform. It provides comparable functionality to the Visual Studio Installer project but in addition, you get the easy to use, modern, graphical development environment of InstallShield, as well as the ability to build your deployment projects using Team Foundation Server. When your application grows beyond InstallShield Limited Edition 2010 you can preserve the investment you have made by importing it into more advanced versions of InstallShield.
How to Get It
To download a copy of the InstallShield Limited Edition, click on the File | New | Project… menu within Visual Studio 2010, browse to the Other Project Types | Setup and Deployment node, and select the InstallShield 2010 node that contains a project template called “Enable InstallShield Limited Edition”.
After creating the project, the template will direct you to the InstallShield registration page in order to continue. When you have registered, the page will direct you to download the product from the partner website.
How to Use It
Once you have installed the product, the New Project dialog will provide an option to create an InstallShield Limited Edition Project. Create a new project using the File | New | Project… menu to bring up the New Project dialog and select “InstallShield Limited Edition Project” template under the Other Project Types | Setup and Deployment | InstallShield 2010 node.
Visual Studio 2010 with InstallShield Limited Edition 2010 offers new options for deployment that can ease the effort of building deployment solutions for your applications, integrate deployment into your automated build process, and provide an upgrade path to bigger and better solutions as your application grows.
Namaste!
Lame, you should have stuck to the original plan and included WIX instead of plastering VS with ad-ware.
WiX would have been preferable, and I'm disappointed that the plan to include it was dropped. I won't be using InstallShield - spent too many years fighting it already.
I don't understand... please explain us why you didn't use WiX?
I can only add to the others: why drop WiX? Its your chance to finally add a real DSL for building installers. We don't need another easy-to-use GUI, we need something that stands the test of an enterprise.
I think that nobody should be disappointed about WiX not included in the VS 2010: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2009/4/1/Visual-Studio-will-not-ship-the-WiX-toolset-contributes-only
Just install and use it.
How much is Flexera paying Microsoft to have their trialware bundled with Visual Studio?
Add me to the long list of disappointed users re the dropping of WiX from VS2010. I think the VS team really dropped the ball with this.
I'm still not entirely clear why it was dropped from the product. If jQuery can be included, why can't WiX?
We have used install shield in the past and our experience with it was horrible. So, VS 2010 ships with another horrible add-in.. we don't need options for deployment, we just need one tool that does the job without me spending hours trying to learn workarounds with bugs in products such as install shield.
I've been using WiX for the last 4.5 years building solid setup packages for enterprises and was really disappointed that WiX was dropped from VS 2010! I will stay with WiX anyway and never look at InstallShield!
I agee with others. Please reconsider dropping InstallShield from VS.
WIX has been a revelation to me in the past 12 months.
I am sorely disappointed that the VS team has chosen not to support it.
As Val pointed out, Rob Mensching wrote about this back in April - see http://tinyurl.com/d4eeh3 . If you want WiX we continue to work on it hard as ever, and you can easily get it.
We currently have the same people finishing the work for each shipping milestone of WiX tools that we had when we were going to put it in the box. We've just removed the overhead of putting it in the box, choosing to focus the work on the product itself.
The VS team still supports WiX. Many of the code contributors to WiX are members of the WiX community. Close to two dozen VS FTE are working on components of WiX today that we're using internally - around half of them full time. We are making sure that those contributions will be available to the community.
Finally WiX is in posted our Gallery by one of our Program Managers - shown here:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/5f43f268-7752-48c7-90e8-ae5b6f136b3f
We do think that InstallShield Limited Edition is a great product for our Dev10 customers who prefer a designer-based approach over a language-based approach to deployment and want the new features that aren't in Visual Studio Installer Project. One of our goals was to let users of the latter migrate to ISLE, and the feature set certainly allows for that.
Let me know what you think. Please send more feedback to me at glang, here at microsoft.com
I don't know why you guys went with InstallShield.
I have used Installaware for the last four years and
I will never go back to InstallShield. It was difficult
to use number one and the installers took too long to
build with InstallShield. The most irritating thing
with InstallShield is you would replace a few files
and it would suddenly re-install itself.
Will give it a try...mainly Azure
Mmmm... VS2010 + InstallShield...
There hasn't been a combination so good since the Vista-compatible version of Microsoft Bob was released.
A real crowd-pleaser this one.