How to create a runnable setup out of bootstrapper packages?

Question

I would like to install a .NET 4.0 application on the user's machine that does not meet certain prerequisites.

I need to be able to define the installation order of these prerequisites in my installer, because they depend on each other (.NET 4.0, Windows Installer 4.5, SQL Server 2008 R2 and others).

AFAIK this is doable via the following ways:

1. Creating a custom bootstrapper and include it as a prerequisite in my Visual Studio Setup Project: I'm doing silent installations so I can't provide appropriate feedback to the user this way. I don't want to do this.

2. Using tools like dotNetInstaller.

3. Creating a custom installer, that installs all the prerequisites in the correct order and finally the application itself.

However I would like to use the install conditions defined in the default bootstrapper packages found usually under the following path: c:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\

So my question is: how can I make a single executable out of a bootstrapper package that uses the installation conditions (recreating them would be bothersome) defined in the XML files? I would like to use this single executable with dotNetInstaller or my custom installer.

Alternatively how can I tell dotNetInstaller to use these packages instead of having to recreate all the install conditions manually?

Answer 1

What you could do is create a native app with a UI so that you can communicate to the user what is going on. Embed your .Net 4.0 and your setup files into the native app and run them when the system meets the prerequisites. I wrote a blog post on doing this at http://blog.foldertrack.com/?p=45