InstallAware

I’ve been using InstallShield and recently noticed InstallAware. When it comes to Windows Installer, I confess I don’t know much about it and I only learn as much about an installer as I have to get our products installed. I spent a long time figuring out how to get things accomplished in InstallShield. I still tend to do a lot in script simply because I don’t know to do it otherwise.

My situation is a bit different than the typical one because I’m installing a hardware driver along with some utility application. My biggest problem with InstallShield is that we have several different products, but the installation of them is all pretty similar except for things like filenames and product name. So I need to keep a different install project for each product. Then every time I add a button or a text label or whatever, I need to manually add those changes to all projects. This is too tedious and error-prone.

Here are some specific questions I have:

1.) I would like to have one install project for all of our products. The product names will be different as well as the names of the files that get installed. But the install process is the same. I’d like to know if and how I can accomplish this with InstallAware.

It seems the way to do this is with include scripts, true? If so, I may have some follow-up questions next.

2.) When our product installs, it appears in Add/Remove programs. Unfortunately, if the user tries to uninstall from there, it doesn’t currently work correctly. We need to run some script during uninstall to delete some files and to uninstall the hardware driver (using Win32 calls). But InstallShield’s script is not available at that time.

Using InstallAware, would script get executed if the user uninstalls from Add/Remove programs? Including custom plug-ins? Or do you need to uninstall from the setup program to get script?

3.) We need to support multiple languages. In InstallAware, how could I best deal with different products having different sets of languages? In InstallShield, I can create different releases within one project, each release having a different set of languages. Can I accomplish the same thing in InstallAware?

Sometimes we release a product with different sets of languages depending on the locale we sell to or which customer we sell to. It would be nice to be able to easily switch between build configurations for this.

4.) InstallAware seems to have included a limited number of redistributables compared to InstallShield. What about Microsoft C++ Runtime libraries 7.0, 7.1, and 8.0?

Thanks!

Hello,

Below are the answers to your questions:

1) Very easily done using Compiler Variables. These can be thought of as #define statements, and can be used anywhere in your setup - the project name, files that are being installed, and so on. They are resolved at build time and you can specify their values from the command line, or from the IDE.

2) InstallAware's uninstall is 100% scriptable from Add-Remove programs. In fact one of InstallAware's strength is that there is one setup script which runs for installs, maintenances, and uninstalls. Just generate a setup project and take a quick look at the code - you will see what I mean. Exactly what you specify will execute at install, maintain, or uninstall time. No limitations, no complications.

3) You can create a project that supports multiple languages. Then using compiler variables at build time, and scripting, you can choose which languages to display at runtime (or lock down to a single language). This is not part of InstallAware's built-in release management, but it is still very easily done using compiler variables and simple scripting.

4) We are always adding redistributables. In fact, if you can point us at Microsoft's official downloads for these runtimes, my colleague Michael can quickly create a package which extends your InstallAware IDE to show these in the Application Pre-Requisites view, extending the pre-built list of runtimes. We are happy to do this for our customers. In addition, you can run the native installers using the setup script, or merge modules, if you'd like to take care of it yourself.

Please let me know if you have more questions. We are here to provide you a more satisfying setup development experience!