News

Visual Studio App Installer Updated

Many devs still miss the Microsoft-built installer included with Visual Studio 2010 and earlier versions.

Starting with Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft stopped offering its internal Setup project template, instead going with a third-party version from Flexera Software called InstallShield Limited Edition. That particular switch angered a number of .NET developers who relied on Setup to deploy their applications to various platforms.

Despite that, Microsoft stayed with the Flexera solution, which comes free with Visual Studio. Now, InstallShield has been upgraded in response to developer requests. Tony Goodhew, a Microsoft program manager, wrote today on the Visual Studio blog that the top needs were the ability to install 64-bit apps and services, install Windows Services, distribute the Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) runtime, and use relative paths within project files. All those features have been added to InstallShield Limited Edition.

The new version, still in beta, is available for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013 Preview. Goodhew also noted that some Visual Studio users were having issues with project conversion, "particularly when converting setup projects that included custom actions." He said Microsoft is working with Flexera to diagnose and solve those problems, and asking for feedback on specific related issues.

Another installer that many Windows developers use is the open-source Windows Installer XML (WiX), available on SourceForge. One developer said his solution is to develop in Visual Studio 2012 and keep a copy of Visual Studio 2010 on his development box, just to "generate the setup" from the Setup template included with the older versions.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • GitHub Previews Agentic AI in VS Code Copilot

    GitHub announced a raft of improvements to its Copilot AI in the Visual Studio Code editor, including a new "agent mode" in preview that lets developers use the AI technology to write code faster and more accurately.

  • Copilot Engineering in the Cloud with Azure and GitHub

    Who better to lead a full-day deep dive into this tech than two experts from GitHub, which introduced the original "AI pair programmer" and spawned the ubiquitous Copilot moniker?

  • Uno Platform Wants Microsoft to Improve .NET WebAssembly in Two Ways

    Uno Platform, a third-party dev tooling specialist that caters to .NET developers, published a report on the state of WebAssembly, addressing some shortcomings in the .NET implementation it would like to see Microsoft address.

  • Random Neighborhoods Regression Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the random neighborhoods regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other ML regression techniques, advantages are that it can handle both large and small datasets, and the results are highly interpretable.

  • As Some Orgs Restrict DeepSeek AI Usage, Microsoft Offers Models and Dev Guidance

    While some organizations are restricting employee usage of the new open source DeepSeek AI from a Chinese company due to data collection concerns, Microsoft has taken a different approach.

Subscribe on YouTube

Upcoming Training Events