|
A free program from Microsoft, the Visual Studio Installer allows you to take advantage of this new technology for applications developed using Visual Studio. This program integrates with Visual InterDev,and is ideal for creating simple installations, with out costing the developer anything. It also provides a useful utility for importing Visual Basic projects, effectively making it possible to create a professional installation within a few minutes. Once you have installed the Visual Studio Installer (from here on referred to as VSI), run the program. You will then be greeted with the standard Visual InterDev New Project dialog. Click the Visual Studio Installer Projects under the Visual Studio folder, and create a new Visual Basic Installer Project. You will notice there is also an Empty Installer Project, which you could use, but it is usually far quicker to let VSI to select the correct components your application needs for you. For this we obviously need a VB project. I recommend you just create a quick VB application that does absolutely nothing for the moment! Don't forget to compile the project to an EXE file. When the wizard starts, select a Visual Basic project you want to create a setup program for. Below this path, you then have the choice whether to create an Installer or a Merge Module. An Installer is a stand-alone installation for an application, where as a Merge Module is an installation for a shared component. This can then be used in another Installer project that requires the component. In this case, leave the Create Installer option selected, and click Finish. |