Klugy app deployment

[philrock]

My son and I have written a mechanical engineering app in VB 2008. I'm a mechanical engineer; my son's a programmer. We hope to eventually market the app.

We paid no attention to the issue of deployment until very late in the game. My son finally came up with a deployment scheme that doesn't require much user intervention, but takes a lot of time - about 20 minutes.

I've installed a lot of software much more powerful and complicated than ours (MS Office, AutoCad, SolidWorks), that seems to install much more gracefully than ours. If I purchased a program and its install procedure went like ours, I might well abort the installation before it finished, and put it off until I really felt like suffering. My impression is that this is inherent in apps created in VB. Is that correct? Should we be considering porting our program over to C++ or Delphi?

 

[RiverGuy]

I've never created a deployment package for VB.Net or VB6 for that matter which took up to twenty minutes to install.

Are you installing a lot of data in addition to your executable code? This could be things like bitmaps which would take up a lot of space, or database files, etc. If this is the case, then those items are probably larger than your executable code, so I don't see how using another language for your code would make this any better for you. You'd still have large data files to copy.

There are other things to check -- have you tried installing this application on multiple PCs? Perhaps the problem exists on your test machine only.

You could also try a third-party product to create installation packages such as InstallShield if you are so inclined.

 

[jebenson]

I've used INNO Setup, which is free and works quite well IMHO. Here's the link:

http://www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php

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[philrock]

Guys,

Thanks for the ideas. I'll talk with my son about whether we're loading lots of data, and I'll check out INNO Setup.

I do remember my son talking about .net framework components for computers that do not already have them.

 

[Sorwen]

I've never done this, but it is very common that if you do have a lot of data to zip it all and have the program pull from those zip files as needed. Just a though if it turns out it is the number of files causing the problem.

-I hate Microsoft!
-Forever and always forward.
-My kingdom for a edit button!

 

[TheVampire]

I do remember my son talking about .net framework components for computers that do not already have them."

If you are installing net framework items as well as your app, then you could very well be increasing the amount of time it takes to install dramatically. Especially if you are only using the bootstrap versions of the net framework and the actual data is being downloaded from microsoft's servers on demand. The amount of time the install could take would depend on the particular PCs connection speed to the internet. You can avoid this by using the full redistributable versions of the framework.

All of this can be componded if you have to install more than one version of net framework ( i.e. 1.1, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 etc... )