On AIR with Flex

This post speaks about creating a installer for .NET windows applications using Visual Studio 2005. Note, this is different from creating a Setup Project for Web Applications.

For any desktop application with a good number of files, an installer with all your files bundled up is required for a hassle free usage. A handful of applications appear on googling, most of the better one’s, unfortunately, being shareware’s. Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 provides a pretty impressive utility for this purpose. This post leads you from creating a installer project, building the setup & MSI files, combining these two files, a rusty way to launch application after installation, and keeping your application updated

There are various tutorials on the net to guide you on creating a installation package.
Here is a good link,
http://en.csharp-online.net/Deploying_Windows_Applications

This post continues from where the above post concludes.
While the above article serves as an excellent guide on deploying your .NET application using the ClickOnce deployment as well as Visual Studio deployment, this post goes on to show further ways for tweaking your installation.

Combining generated files
Your .NET Application installer, as delivered by your Visual Studio Setup Project consists of 2 files, Setup.exe and .msi. While the Microsoft Installer (MSI) file is sufficient for installation on most machines, Setup.exe does a bit of error handling in case an incompatible .NET framework is installed. Installing the application with Setup.exe, almost guarantees a clean install. While retaining this advantage, it could be cumbersome to put up two files for installing.
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