Easy Way To Create Installer For .Net Projects

Question

What is the best/easiest way to create an installer for a .net application that will install the framework if required.

I only have visual studio express if that makes any difference.

Answer 1

It may not be the easiest tool to use but WIX will do anything you need it to. It is open source and has strong community support.

Answer 2

Visual Studio Express includes Click-Once deployment.

This site links to deployment options.

Answer 3

Well you probably want to read up about the .Net bootstrappers.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163899.aspx

Visual Studio allows you to create installation projects in which you can specify that the framework is a pre-requisite.

One of the slight annoyances of having the Microsoft bootstrapper is that you need to ship an EXE together with your MSI (the EXE takes care of bootstrapping). This may or may not be a ship stopper for you. The bootstrapper is included, for free, in the Windows SDK.

More refined/costly installation frameworks like Wise or Installshield will take care of this for you (and allow you to package everything into a single EXE).

If you go the WiX path: read up on this question.