VS setup project - is there drawbacks?

Question

Taking into account that some Windows Installer products from independent vendors (for example IstallShield) are rather expensive we can say that using a setup project in Visual Studio for building Installation packages has some drawbacks. Otherwise why developers should buy something else.

For what reasons developers could use something else (not Visual Studio) for building their setup packages?

Answer 1

Generally speaking the third party installers let you perform very complex setup actions relatively easily. Not to say that most things cannot be done with VS, but there can be quite a bit of hand coding for custom install actions. The third party tools hide a lot of this manual work.