Install Matlab MCR as part of the C# Installer Wizard

Question

I have wrote a program HelloApp with Matlab and packaged it as .NET Assembly using deploytool as described here. As a result I have got helloapp.dll library, which I included into my Visual Studio 2015 as a reference, so I can run Matlab methods directly from C#. To run the code without Matlab installed, the end user needs Matlab Runtime (MCR) installed at least.

Now I want to create an installer for my C# program. I have came across Visual Studio 2015 Installer Projects which provides some tools to create program setup wizard. The problem is, I don't know how to include download and setup of MCR package as a step in installation process to ensure the user has all the required prerequisites in order for program to run.

Answer 1

Well this is not really an answer, but comment area in question was too short ...

I don't know much about VS2015 Installer as I personnally use innosetup. Anyway to check if runtime is installed on target machine you can look if following key exists in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MathWorks\MATLAB Runtime\9.0   

See my posts here and here for further details.

NB1: Note that installer for Matlab runtime is very large (about 1 GB). I would not package it with application to deploy, but just warn the user to install it separately.

NB2: I think Mathworks is packaging C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2015b\toolbox\compiler\deploy\win64\InstallAgent.zip (~66MB) rather than MCRInstall.exe (~1GB) when deploying standalone installer with deploytool for downloading the runtime during install but I don't know how it works.