Installer for .NET 2.0 application for Windows 98

Question

How can an automatic installer for .NET 2.0 application be created for Windows 98?

I mean for application and also for .NET 2.0 if missing.

I tried to do it by creating a setup project for Visual Studio 2008, but I didn't succeed. I installed IE6 SP1 manually, but Installer still crashed. Windows Installer 2.0 is installed. It's impossible to install Installer 3.0 there. I unchecked Installer at Setup Project prerequisites, but still it's not possible to install the application - the error message says that it requires a newer version of Windows.

How can this be resolved?

Answer 1

You need to manually update the machine to windows installer 3.x first. Then it should go.

Answer 2

According to MS here, Windows Installer 3.0+ is not available for Windows 98.

Running Installer 3.1 setup manually on Windows 98 fails with the message

Missing entry point for NtOpenProcessToken function

Answer 3

According to this article Win98 is supported for 2.0

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480241.aspx why not just getting the redistributable from Microsoft?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0856EACB-4362-4B0D-8EDD-AAB15C5E04F5&displaylang=en

Answer 4

Do not use Visual Studio 2008 if you intend to deploy to Windows 9x or ME. VS2008 does not support these operating systems anymore, and if you're stuck with them you should use VS2005 or earlier. Also see this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/213711

Answer 5

@Josh - It's true, .NET 2.0 is supported on Win98, but it seems it's impossible to prepare instalation using visual studio setup project. I managed to install .NET 2.0 manually on Win98 (Windows Installer 2.0 is sufficient), and then I run my application. The problem is how to prepare installer. Application is designed for highly unexperienced users (sometimes without even internet connection) so the best option is to prepare cd with all prereqesites and autostart with big install buton :)

I'm thinking of other install engine, but the main requirement is that is should be commandline tool for build-comp integration. I'm thinking about InnoSetup (used by me a few year ago in Delphi age) or NSIS but I don't know anything about this. Do anybody know if they contain good scripts for installing .NET prereq. ?