Removing text in the banner in a Windows Installer project

Question

I'm using the standard Visual Studio deployment project and want to remove the text in the banner (the text that says "Welcome to the Your Project Setup Wizard".

I want to remove it because I want a custom banner and don't want the text written over the banner.

I can't see any properties in VS to allow this. Can it be done without prodding around in the .MSI?

Cheers,

Steve

Answer 1

You can "remove" the text by removing the Welcome dialog and replacing it with a custom dialog. In VS 2005 -

• Right click on the Setup project in the solution explorer
• Select View - User Interface
• Under the Start group for Install and Administrative Install delete "Welcome"

Then you can add a "Textboxes (A)" dialog (right click the "Start" group and select Add Dialog) to the project, set the visible property for the text boxes to false. Move the Textboxes (A) up to the top of the "Start" sequence.

The properties for this dialog include:

• BannerBitmap
• BannerText
• BodyText

This should allow you to control the look / feel (to a certain extent) of this new "Welcome" page.

Answer 2

I'd just like to add to this that sometimes creating a custom dialog is a pain in the rear and that you can follow the advice at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winformssetup/thread/5af7ff28-3dbb-4a8a-8d62-a09af9e32b29 to use a tool called InstEdit (http://www.instedit.com -- there is a free version) to edit the outputted installer and remove the BannerText

Answer 3

I don't believe there is an easy way (e.g. changing a property). I had the same problem recently. I couldn't find anything. Ended up using Orca to "prod around in the .msi". It seems the only thing you can alter easily is the language it's displayed in.