Best Windows Installation file Creator? [closed]

Question

Inno Setup is easy to use, free, open source and scriptable if you need it.

I've always had a good experience with NSIS

• It's open source
• It has a big community (and hence lots of plugins)
• For simple things, its script-based approach is nice and easy
• It's lightweight and fast

On the downside, if you want to do something more sophisticated, you need to use something that looks a bit like assembly language - very odd, and not particularly pleasant. Thanks for the comments about that - I'd forgotten all about it!

Inno Setup is simple, light-weight and covers a lot of ground. I've used it for 5-6 apps over the last 5 years and it never let me down. Highly recommended!

Before that I used InstallShield, which is one of these systems that are so complicated that they "offer" you to "utilize" their "professional services" to create your installations. In other words it's kind of a hack that only managed to build a customer base in the childhood of Windows because there was no competition. It's a bit like a 747 that runs like a Trabant.

The worst, by far, installer product I've worked with is "WISE for Windows Installer". This had me literally smash my mouse in the office floor in frustration. It is (or at least was, 4 years ago) utter crap and should be avoided at all costs. This is exactly the kind of software that those pesky license agreements are there for, else the publisher would be sued into oblivion...

Yes, two ideas:

• If you're looking for a way to statically put files, registry keys, start menu shortcuts, et cetera on your customer's systems, you should be looking for an installer solution. Many of these exist, and choosing the best one mostly comes down to features and pricing. I happen to like Caphyon's Advanced Installer, and it does have a freeware version that looks like it might meet your needs, except for the ability to run executables at scheduled times (which would require the Windows Task Scheduler support only found in the Enterprise edition, which is in the ultra-expensive price range, comparable to InstallShield...)

• If controlling the flow of events on your customer's systems is more important than getting the executables on the system, you may want to look into Automise, which is basically an ultra-friendly UI for creating scripts, which makes things like scheduling tasks quite easy.

Anyway, you can download trial editions of both pieces of software, to see which one (or possibly both) will allow you to do what you want in the easiest way, or at least give you some ideas on how to best serve your customers. It may turn out that simply adding a new, 'supervisor' executable to take care of registry keys, scheduling, etc. could solve the problem without any third-party add-ons...

WixEdit is an open source (install shield like) authoring tool that uses the Wix Runtime from Microsoft.

Wix Tutorials

If you don't have any specific requirements apart from being able to install a few executables, then basically anyone will do. I'd recommend NSIS, not because it is particularly easy to work with (it has a cumbersome assembly-like language which isn't to practical to do more complex things in), but because it is free, has a large and active community, and it generates fast installers with very low overhead. As an extra bonus, you can run the compiler (i.e. the tool which generates the installer) on Linux.

Edit: ...and whatever you do, do NOT use InstallShield.