Can't find Dotnet install optimizer, any ideas?

Question

Back in 2005 I worked on a dotnet desktop application. At the time I was looking for installers to create the install package. During my search I cam across a neat tool that would bind your application with dotnet itself only including the parts of dotnet that were required for the application to run. It did this using dependency resolution. Licensing started at about $5000, which was about half the budget of the project so I never purchased it.

I don't remember the name of the installer and I have googled but found nothing. Have you come across this product? Do you remember the name or have a link to their site?

EDIT: To clarify, when using this product you did not need to check that dotnet was installed or which version was installed and there was need to install dotnet. dotnet simply was linked into the application itself so the application and dotnet where indistinguishable.

Answer 1

Not exactly what you want but accomplishes your goal: There is a guy who repackages .Net 1.1 and .Net 2.0, with all updates, into much smaller EXEs that support silent installation. You could check if the user has .NET and if not silently use these to install it. It's actually better than what you were using because the user has all of .NET, not some manually crippled version. These files aren't too bad on size, .NET 2.0 in this package is only 16MB.

http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/

Answer 2

From Jon's FAQ:

Having said the above, there are products which build everything you need from the framework for your application, along with your application itself, into one big bundle:

• RemoteSoft's linker and mini-deployment tool
• Thinstall Studio
• Xenocode