Custom Installer

Question

Hi Can anybody point me to how I can build a custom installer so if a user clicks on a link in their account this will download a custom installer which will have with it some account details such as the username and password. Using this information it should be able to install an application and configure it to the users account without the user filling in any account details

Answer 1

This has very little to do with installs and more to do with build and release management. Here's how I would go about it:

Design an installer that does whatever you need to do and ultimately has empty USERNAME and PASSWORD properties in the Property table. Use this as you "seed" MSI.

Have a build and release property that when a user requests to download the MSI a server side process grabs a copy of the seed MSI and opens the database to perform SQL updates against the property table to implant the username and password values.

Finally present this download to the user.

As you can see, there is the work of actually writing the installer ( which can't possibly be explained or taught as a single question ) and the process of managing it's variation just in time for release ( which also can't be explained since we don't know what your infrastructure looks like and the scope would be massive. )

Answer 2

Hi Thanks for the replies. What I am trying to achieve is the following: Uses are able to log into their account on the web to do work but there is also a WPF version of the software which allows uses to do more offline kind of work. At the moment I have a link on the site which they can click on to download the msi which then installs the desktop version. But the problem is I want to also at the same time download an xml file which will have the users account and license information. I dont want the users to to go and click on another link to download the extra xml file. This I want to be download automatically to the location where the installer will install the software. So I ma trying to find different ways I can solve this problem. It is not necessary for me to have the msi I can implement any solution at this stage