Removing Default dialogs from MSI

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WiX Alternatives: After describing WiX’s Burn feature, I started thinking that it might not be what you need to get your job done. It is developer heavy and involved – though it should be perfectly manageable for a developer to implement what is needed without too many problems. Flexibility is very high.

Commercial deployment tool options Installshield and Advanced Installer have GUI-interfaces you can use to create a setup.exe which will kick off MSI files with parameters you gather.

Installshield

In Installshield there is a rather new feature in recent editions called Installshield Suite Projects. I am not sure what editions it is available in (higher editions – for example “Premium”). It allows you to install a variety of files “in sequence”: MSI, MSP, EXE, MSU, etc....

Though I have never used it much, I am pretty sure you can create a suite GUI fairly easily, and control what dialogs show from what setup. I would install them all silently with a command line. Do check out at least the first link below – the screen shots. It should give you the basic idea of things.

Some Links:

Advanced Installer

Advanced Installer features advanced options to include prerequisites and packages with your main MSI installer, and allows you to create new dialogs just like Installshield. Yet again I haven’t had the time to test it fully, but below are some pointers on its use.

The features for this center around the views “Prerequisites“, “Build” and “Dialogs“. In the “Build” view set EXE output. In “Prerequisites” select the top level “Packages” item to get a list of built-in, available prerequisites. Right click “Pre-Install” to add your own package. I am not familiar with the dialog details, but you can work on them in the “Dialogs” view. Not rocket science is the good news.

Some Links:

I will stop at that. Too many links already.

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