Create Installer (setup) application for a VFP 9 Project 2

[Rajesh Karunakaran]

Dear Friends,

We have a VFP 9 project. I want to create an installer for this project.
Which installer is the most appropriate one for VFP 9?

I have not yet used any installer or created any installation package of a VFP application so far (embarrassed to say that, yeah!)
I know there is InstallShield but its not a native feature of Win 10, right?
So, how can I get an installer (preferably an OpenSource one or which can be downloaded free)?

Thanks in advance
Rajesh

 

[Mike Lewis]

There are several installers to choose from. One of the most populare is Inno Setup, from J R Software. It works well both with VFP and Windows 10. Doug Hennig has written a detailed article that will tell you more about it. See

http://doughennig.com/papers/Pub/InnoSetup.pdf

It's true that InstallShield is not native to Windows 10, but it will still work. A cut-down version is available on your VFP install CD. But personaly I prefer Inno, which is much simpler to use and produces smaller executables.

Mike

__________________________________
Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Visual FoxPro articles, tips and downloads

 

[Rajesh Karunakaran]

Thank you Mike.
I will check this.

Rajesh

 

[Olaf Doschke]

Just for sake of completeness:

Intallshield is not a native part of Win10, but it comes with VFP9 and is one third party component you can install. It comes with a so called merge module for VFP runtimes and includes another for the C++ runtime anyway, independent of VFP. The version coming with VFP is an express version with limited features, but sufficient. Several people prefer Inno setup, as it's open source and free in its entire feature set, so you can do more than with InstallShield Express (ISE), when deep diving into Inno documentation.

What's part of Windows is the Windows Installer service, which software like InstallShield and Inno Setup make use of, so the software finally is registered for the Windows features of listing installed software and their uninstallation.

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Rajesh Karunakaran]

Olaf, Thank you very much.
When you said 'Just for sake of completeness', you meant it!

Rajesh

 

[Olaf Doschke]

It's still an option, one advantage is a nicer user interface for creating your setup projects and an assistant not so bad at reminding you about which steps to go through. But that doesn't make it intuitive to the end. For example finding a setup.mi or setup.exe in the folder structure ISE creates for all possible types of setups and media you could use, is not straight forward.

Situations speaking for ISE come with the need to make some registry keys or even some scripted actions as part of the installation. ISE can install simple EXE including runtimes, can autodetect COM classes you have in your EXE or DLL and register them, you can manually specify registration of OCXes and DLLs, too. So it is quite sufficient, too. VFP help has a walkthrough to it, which has more verbose instructions than the Inno recipes you also can find in the fox wiki. Doug Hennig's paper is very thorough, indeed.

I'd say if you don't get an Inno setup going, try ISE and postpone learning Inno to later. From the outset it surely pays to finally learn Inno, but creating a setup may have it's timebox right now, you wouldn't like to stretch. Inno Setup White Paper of Doug: 28 pages. Walkthrough:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms917481.aspx

~5 pages (hard to compare a website with a PDF).

Bye, Olaf.

 

[Rajesh Karunakaran]

Dear Olaf,
As usual, amazing explanation!
Thank you very much for the info, guidelines and suggestions.

Rajesh