Release flags are essentially used to conditionally exclude or include certain parts of the product from each compiled setup - this is often a large part of what is asked for when making professional families of setups. The release view in Installshield allows full overview of all your different setup types and.

I'm currently doing some investigation on moving off of the installation package we currently use (Wise Installer 9) and moving to something that will handle things like Windows Vista, Windows 7 and 64-bit systems. Localization of the installers would be of benefit since we do have a number of French Canadian clients as well. We currently have installations for software packages and utilities in the following technologies: • Progress 4GL • Visual Studio 2005 • Visual Studio 2008 •.NET Compact Framework 3.5 I've already looked at and, and also the for the old Wise system. I haven't played with InstallShield much at all yet, but from everything I've seen/installed it seems to be one of the industry favourites. I've browsed through some of the Stack Overflow tags relating to and I'm curious to see what the group says about it. Do I just by default go to them? How good is WiX at non.NET stuff?

How good is WiX at non.NET stuff? WiX has support for all features by design. Windows installer predates.NET.

Personally I prefer WiX over InstallShield because • the XML text format allows review of commits, merging of changes between branches • build automation should include setup generation, which is easy with WiX • wixlib files with component group definitions allow for modular setup development. No need to worry about the dependencies of the dependencies, etc. • no licensing or deployment headaches, we simply include the WiX toolset in a /tools folder of our projects in When we used InstallShield, these were all pain points. WiX does have a very steep learning curve though.

I haven't used InstallShield in a few years. At my last job we moved away from it to NSIS mainly because its binary format made version control difficult, and because a few times the source file simply became corrupted, with no hope for recovery. That might have been related to of course! On top of that though, it was needlessly complicated. Don't get me wrong - we were doing some reasonably complicated installers, with lots of conditional paths, merge modules, and sophisticated UIs, but even for that it was far, far too complex. NSIS has a great plugin system, and you can program it imperatively using the, have generated, and lots of other things besides. I inherited a handful of InstallShield (v12) projects.

The files are all text/XML and thus there are no version control issues. We have a build machine that uses their command line tools, which works well. What I don't like is (a) the cost per developer seat and (b) bugs. Inno Setup is very capable/flexible and there are generally multiple ways to accomplish a goal, which led to a steep learning curve. We are several versions behind their latest version (due to their upgrade cost structure). Because our products run on Widows, if we have to switch I might first research Microsoft's installer solution that comes with a MSDN subscription.

I am trying to convince myself and my work place the NSIS is a respectable enough installer to replace InstallShield. Our main fear is that unfamiliar installer will deter users from installing the application fearing the unknown. Mind you I am talking purely on the end user experience of the application installer, not the installer environment, features, flexibility. For this, I have started to fish around the net for a complete list of products, preferable well known brands, Using NSIS as their installer. Failing to find such document I turn to you dear NSIS guru's.

Can you chip in names of products using this installer? 10x, Liberty. Quote: Originally posted by eran.liberty Mind you I am talking purely on the end user experience of the application installer, not the installer environment, features, flexibility. Then download and run some installers, and put yourself in the shoes of an end-user. From: Winamp, DivX, 7-Zip, FileZilla, Ethereal. Download and install NSIS itself. How do they feel to you?

My personal opinion is they behave so much like similar InstallShield/InnoSetup/Wise packages that it makes no difference which you choose. The user doesn't care what install packager you used. They just want to click 'Next,' 'I Agree,' 'Next,' 'Next,' 'Finish.' Quote: Originally posted by bhaelochon Then download and run some installers, and put yourself in the shoes of an end-user. From: Winamp, DivX, 7-Zip, FileZilla, Ethereal. Download and install NSIS itself. How do they feel to you?

My personal opinion, both as a developer and an end-user, is they're so close to InstallShield/InnoSetup/Wise as to make absolutely no difference. The user doesn't care what install packager you used. They just want to click 'Next,' 'I Agree,' 'Next,' 'Next,' 'Finish.' Personally I cant agree more. But my comp has a history of being afriend of the new, less known, less debuged, open source (for god sake) and basicly anything that has bitten thier ass in thier long years of accumelated experience. I have seen this attitude saves out behinds several times in the past so I am the last to LOL it. But I do belive moving into NSIS might be an imporvment over our WISE/Installshild/custom-made jungle.

So I want to come with as strong case as I can build. Had I had planty of installers experience to back me up, this might have been an easier job. But since either NSIS or InstallShield are going to be my first.

I have to relay on this Forum (b.t.w. 10x for all) and various documents with titles like 'NSIS Vs. InstallShield' or 'I have seen Installer heaven story by.' You c my point.

If you can contribute some punches that realy tilt the scale. Fire at will. 'money' and 'open source' are not considered pros in this context. There are some BIG names on the list of NSIS users.

If those companies thought NSIS was immature or obscure or bug-ridden, do you really suppose they'd have even given NSIS a second glance? Of course not.

They have reputations to maintain and uphold, and they can't do that if they distribute ugly, unintuitive installers. Granted, the same can be said for InstallShield, but just because a product costs $1700 doesn't mean it's better than one that costs nothing. Download NSIS and use some of the examples to build a proof-of-concept for your product. Do the same with InstallShield, Wise, InnoSetup, and whatever other install packages you're looking. Play with each of them for a couple of extra hours, too.

If your boss doesn't want you to 'waste' time on them at work, take them home. Some key points that may guide the decision making process: • Which one are you most comfortable developing setups with? • Which setup do you like best from the perspective of an end-user? • Which one meets your needs in the simplest, most efficient way? • Which one does your boss like best?

• How active are the support and peer communities? • What is the availability of examples, tools, extensions, templates, etc.? The decision is ultimately up to you and your company--not us. All we can do is welcome you with open arms if you choose NSIS and wish you good luck if you choose someone else. Eran.liberty: Your approach to an open source tool is totally flawed. You assume it like a closed proprietary product having some unrevealed, swept-under-the-rug, newbie-biting malfunctions which are known only to a select group of people, so that 'social networking' is the only way to avoid disinformation and form a true opinion. Grave defects never remain unnoticed/hidden in a high profile open source project like NSIS.

Visit project's home page in Sourceforge.net, check the bugs and how they're fixed, nothing is secret. If you discover any bug, step in and file it. If you'd like a new feature, request it, discuss it in this forum. Check the number of posts in this forum, check the number of downloads, and above all, roll your sleeves and start experimenting it now, see for yourself, nothing is magic, eventually it's how you code that determines respect or disrespect, not the tool. Actually, your description of your current status does not make me feel respect at all. Thanks all, It has decided that one of the smaller installers will be done first both as InstallShield and as NSIS and delay decisions till we have personal experience.

So now I have two learning curve to deal with. (or two learning opertunities ).

About the flawed view of open source. All I meant is that given a bug/missing feature, I do not see myself diving into the source to make it better. And dont get me wrong on my previous work, month worth of code went into linux kernel / cvs and other open source project.

This is simply not the case here. So the 'open source' is not a pro! Its not a con either. Same goes for the 'free', 100$, 1000$ even 5000$ are not an issue. If there is an installer system that is just a bit better, in the not so very long run, it worth it.

About my current state not creating too much respect. I wish to amend this state 3.

Thats why I am here asking all the pre-noob questions. It's pretty obvious what NSIS has that InstallShield doesn't have - programmability and real customisability. Don't quote me on that but I've done a huge amount of NSIS work which doesn't involve writing an installer at all (check my site for example). As for performing tasks on the system, you might find that InstallShield has more but that would be because it has a lot of $ behind it. With NSIS usually if there's something you need doing and you haven't found the solution you'd either have to write the code yourself or ask someone else politely to do it! If customisability and choice is not what you want then InstallShield is for you.

When I joined the company it was one of the first jobs I got to build a new Setup for our latest Software. About 5 weeks with InstallShield I where pissed off, frustrated and had still no installer. I started to search for free installers, and had to made a decision between inno, nsis and a third don't know how it was called. After 3 days the setup was done, know - 2 1/2 years later - I've written some macros, have modified the UI a bit, use own dialogs and so on. The next thing I'll do with NSIS is an internet-update for our software, because no one wants to realize this in VB or similiar. You can do a lot with nsis if you spend some time on searching the forums, reading the manuals and collecting the plugins you need - but you would also need some time to get along with Installshield. I hope there are not too much mistakes in the text.

I was in your shoes about 2 years ago. The company I work for, used to rely soley on InstallShield Professional to deploy our products, but it was causing so many problems for both developers and end users, and had some nasty bugs, I was tasked to look for solutions. After looking at the alternatives, I put together a case to move all our installs over to NSIS.

(at the time v2.0beta). Since that day, we have not looked back. Creating installs for developers is now a walk in the park (90% automated), our products have a professional look, are small and efficienct, and best of all bug-free. NSIS gives you nothing for free, this is it's biggest asset, it ONLY does what you code, nothing else. It's plug-in system is simply awesome. We use a slightly modifed NSIS (to suit particular 'roll-back' requirements, and we have developed a plug-in for additional functionaliy our installs require. The only danger, is once your peers see what's possible they may start trying to get NSIS to do crazy stuff.

Kick them occasionaly, to keep them inline!!! The other benefit, we used to have 3 Installshield Pro licences, you would have to bug a fellow developer with a desktop licence, to use their PC to build your install. With NSIS, everyone can build their own installs. I know that recommending NSIS, you may be sticking your reputation on the line, but I say go for it, we have not looked back, since moving from Installshield to NSIS!, and I got some kudos for being the driving factor. We are curring rebasing our cusom NSIS on NSIS2.14, and as expected, things are working perfectly. Some developers in our company still find it hard to believe that an Open Source and free (as in beer) product can out-class the industry leading software package, but it's true. The only reason InstallShield is still the industry leader, is people have invested time and effort into getting stuff to work, and are too afraid to change.

Mensagens De Aniversario Em Audio Para Download. I hope that I won't have to switch. I recently wrapped a build done in IS with NSIS, and my EXE was around 1MB smaller than the original IS build. To me, that speaks volumes. But it seems like it's getting harder to use size as an argument since more and more people are using broadband, and a MB or 2 isn't as big of a deal as it was when almost everyone was on dial-up. Oh well, I'll keep using NSIS to make not-so-sucky installers (my lack of skills injects some suck here and there), and plan on having my NSIS builds demonstrate that there's no reason to switch.

Well, it's only your opinion if you use NSIS or IS but there is one point that ever should be mentioned: I don't know how the IS Support is, but I'm sure that you have to pay for new releases and trainings you need for them. Maybe you have to pay for support-requests too. NSIS and the support you get from the foren is free, maybe not always as fast as it can be in the paid support-range of other products. If I posted a question in the foren it was answered mostly within a few hours and the most problems where solved faster than a day, but let's say two days for really tricky things. My boss at first said that NSIS locks crappy, needs too much time and doesn't have the abilities IS has. He is fascinated what can be done in NSIS after I have worked a bit on the Setup, and he really likes the new design (little modified UMUI) and our customers like it too, because it's know a simple 'klick, klick, done' installation.

Sure, it's not a fault of IS that this couldn't be done earlier, but the colleague who worked on the IS setups longer time ago has spent about a half year in creating the setup as it was. Take a look on the which looks like the newest IS Setups I've seen. If you're interested in some help or a overview what our setup does now, you can send me a pm greetz Davion (sorry for my constant long posts). I have been trying different installers for years. I started with winzip self extractor 2.2 (strictly speaking it is not an install tool) to wrap existing installers. Then I went on to Install Creator Pro by Clickteam, which was shareware, so there was a page telling the user this program can't be distributed at the end of the installer. Edit: I also tried making my own installers using VB (wayyyyy too hard).

Then around about this time last year, I discovered NSIS, and I have never wanted to search for another installer system since. A good feature is customizability (which I have customized with my own UI and plugins), and single EXE installers (A big plus). I have just read the release notes on the new release and I will have to look in to the simple math calculations at compile time (which I can use to calculate the number of pages to skip to get to an abort page). So you know where I'm coming from, I was using InstallShield for about 6 months. I wrote about 20 different installers with it and eventually got fed up with its awful support for what I considered simple custom tasks.

When I eventually figured out how to do some of what I wanted, I still faced problems with InstallShield's flaky behavior. I was determined to find a replacement for InstallShield, so I looked at WISE. It was also a disappointing experience for me as the IDE itself liked to crash on me from time to time as many others have reported.

I tried a few other installers and eventually came to NSIS. At first I was skeptical for many of the same reasons. I figured that a free open-source installer like this couldn't possibly compete with the likes of InstallShield and WISE which seem to be regarded as industry standards for some reason. The thing is, using NSIS is a COMPLETELY different experience from InstallShield and WISE because absolutely everything is done through scripting which can seem like a daunting task at first. But I used the HM NIS Edit tool to build my first NSIS installer. The wizard took me through the basic steps of creating my first installer, and it wrote the code I needed to get started. The code was a little weird at first but I'm a programmer so I got the hang of it eventually.

Furthermore, I found the user-submitted code examples and tutorials very helpful. I was able to do EVERYTHING I wanted with NSIS.

I've been using it on a fairly large scale now for the past 2 years. And I've had absolutely no complaints with flaky behavior from thousands of users now.

In the latest release of our completely rewritten software I made the installer first automatically detect if Windows Installer 3.1 is installed, and then download & install it if necessary. Then it'll check if.NET 2.0 (or later) is installed on the machine and download it from Microsoft if it's not. It will also perform a CRC check to ensure the installer itself is not corrupt, assign appropriate file associations for the software, and check if the logged in user has administrative privileges. All of this works perfectly. On top of that, the final executable NSIS produces is much smaller than an equivalent InstallShield exe. And an NSIS installer performs the installation MUCH faster than InstallShield as well. So for me it was a no brainer.

Once I got over the initial learning curve of NSIS I never looked back. I highly recommend it for any programmer who wants to build good Windows Installer packages for their software. Just a couple comments too. 3) Use the logic lib for 'if' style programming Absolutely.

I just simple DID NOT want to do the assembly style code. Its just a pain.

The logic lib stuff solves the problem, and for me is mandatory. Personally, I think it should just become part of the NSIS base, so that the various key words of logic lib, just become key words of NSIS itself. Kit Easy Talk Manual Dexterity.

It definitely would help to not scare off people from trying NSIS, (which almost happened to me, before I decided to go at it anyway) 2) This is classic MS lock-in Absolutely. But lets face it, as much as some people may not want to go to Vista, its going to happen. So why not just give in and do it? If NSIS was a multiplatform installer, that did Solaris, Linux, AIX, etc installers, you could argue against doing it, (ie, anti-MS factions), but here, we have an installer that is Windows * only, and as much as.msi is a lock-in, its a lock-in that will have to eventually be given into. >kichik sometimes thought about switching from nsis >proprietary code to some 'real' language like python >(and i'd love it). >but this is just a thought.

Wow, I did not know that! Put me as a 2nd vote for switching to Python! (Not that my vote matters of course) Obviously its a huge and complete rewrite, and a whole lot of time would have to be invested in doing that, but holy cow, would that just change EVERYTHING.

To be able to exploit all the tons and tons of existing Python scripts would just be even more of a bonus. Quote: For straight application installers (copying files, register some stuff, make shortcuts, run some EXEs) that don't require Windows Logo, I would consider NSIS a respectable complete alternative to Installshield/Wise/etc. I'm not an Installshield/Wise/etc guru however I'd say you need to cover a long distance until you come up to the point to realize that nsis is completely different hence you're confusing apples with oranges.

Reviewing your comments I'm considering that nsis main 'disadvantage' is that it is free therefore it has difficulties to fit in a world where respectable is a matter of price. The first time i was in need for installers, was when i was collecting huge amounts of quake2 maps, models and mods.

The most obvious choice back then was winzip sfx, i don't have to mention its limitations. Then i stumbled over a free installer (and i forgot its name), which could do a lot more already. Around 2000 i needed installers for my winamp visualizations (avs) and do to the connection with nullsoft i stumbled over pimp/superpimp, which later became nsis. Havn't used anything since. Nsis allowed me to simple, but very powerful/comfortable setups.

Just out of fun i started adding more features to my installer, such as controls to configure winamp for the installed avs presets. That time i figured, that nsis could be used for a lot more than only installers, so i used it for small tools such as. Actually i'm solving a lot of small tasks in nsis now as it has a nice and simple syntax and is much more than a ms batch file.

I used it at work to split a comma-seperated table into multiple files. Some irony comes in when i talk about. I was not only sick about scripting new installers for all the winamp plugins i did, i was even more sick about seeing others to use winzip sfx and such to distribute their work. So i started on pimpbot, which is a frontend for nsis that is written in nsis itself. It allows anyone to do create equally powerful installers for their winamp avs presets than then one i used already - within a few clicks.