A tip for using InstallShield and TeamBuild 2010 while living in a x86/x64 world

Saturday, January 15, 2011

A tip for using InstallShield and TeamBuild 2010 while living in a x86/x64 world

Visual Studio ALM Blog - Building InstallShield based Installers using Team Build 2010

“Last few weeks, I have been working on Application Packaging stuff using all the widely used tools like InstallShield, WISE, WiX and Visual Studio Installer. So, I thought it would be good to post about how to Build the Installers developed using these tools with Team Build 2010. This post will focus on how to build the InstallShield generated packages using Team Build 2010. For the release of VS2010, Microsoft has partnered with Flexera who are the makers of InstallShield to create InstallShield Limited Edition, especially for the customers of Visual Studio.

First Microsoft planned to release WiX (Windows Installer Xml) with VS2010, but later Microsoft dropped WiX from VS2010 due to reasons which are best known to them and partnered with InstallShield for Limited Edition. It disappointed lot of people because InstallShield Limited Edition provides only few features of InstallShield and it may not feasable to build complex installer packages using this and it also requires License, where as WiX is an open source with no license costs and it has proved efficient in building most complex packages.

Only the last three features are available in InstallShield Limited Edition from the total features offered by InstallShield as shown in below list.

…

…”

Given that more of us may be using InstallShield in the future (link), and be in a TeamBuild environment, I wanted to capture this for future reference.