Force users to run setup.exe instead of *.msi

Question

I've been searching the solution for a while but ended up finding nothing. I would like to ask with Microsoft Setup Project, is there any way to force user to run setup from setup.exe instead of msi file? I tried some solution such as add Launch Condition but do not know how to pass parameter from setup.exe to the msi file...

The reason I ask this is because I need to run some exe files in the setup process and those files require administrator privilege. As you know already we cannot add something like manifest file to require admin privilege for msi file.

I would appreciate any idea.

Answer 1

No, this is not supported by the Visual Studio setup EXE.

A solution is to wrap all your installation files into a self-extracting EXE archive. This archive can launch your setup EXE after extraction. For example, you can use IExpress: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd346760.aspx

Another solution is to use a different setup authoring tool which supports this directly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_installation_software