Why Visual Studio creates .exe installer files?

Question

when I build solutions in Visual Studio, that generates installer files as .exe and .msi, .exe files are useful for what?

Answer 1

The .EXE file that is created by the installer project is a bootstrapper for the .MSI setup file. It is used to launch the .MSI setup file.

Generally, both will launch the setup program and allow the user to install the application. However, sometimes the setup.exe file will run a custom validation routine to determine if the user's computer meets the minimum requirements for installing the software.

For example, if the user does not have Windows Installer, they will not be able to launch the .MSI file, but the .EXE application will still run and inform them that they need to install Windows Installer first. For .NET applications specifically, the .EXE file verifies the presence of the appropriate version of the .NET Framework, and if it is not present, it prompts the user to download and install it.

You can customize the prerequisites that are required for your application in your installer project using Visual Studio. See these MSDN articles for details on how to do that:

• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429(v=VS.100).aspx
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7eh4aaa5(v=VS.100).aspx