More Information about InstallShield LE for Visual Studio

In addition to my blog post in December 2009, here are links to some additional resources about the limited edition of InstallShield that will be included with Visual Studio 2010:

InstallShield Limited Edition is available for download in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Official announcement from Microsoft on the ClickOnce and Setup & Deployment Projects forum (in the announcements section at the top of the forum).
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Building setup and deployment packages in VS 2010

S. Somasegar, Senior Vice President, Developer Division at Microsoft, in his blog announced the partnership between Microsoft and Flexera Software to create InstallShield LE for Visual Studio.
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InstallShield Limited Edition for Visual Studio 2010 Walkthrough

Mike Douglas, IT consultant interested in Team Foundation Server and build automation, has posted a walkthrough of InstallShield LE with many screenshots. He also mentions that this version of InstallShield LE also works with Visual studio 2008.
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Related information:

Published Sat, Jan 9 2010 15:44 by stefan
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Comments

# re: More Information about InstallShield LE for Visual Studio

Let me be blunt and cut to my gripe:   Automated Build Support

TeamBuild isn't a "benefit", it's a fundamental, core requirement for any serious development organization.  F5 simply doesn't cut it.

I believe Mike Douglas is being very niave in believing that Flexera is "working on it".

InstallShield Professional doesn't have ISSAB, why would you believe that InstallShield LE would?   Seriously, if InstallShield LE is free and has command line build support and can be installed on unlimited numbers of build agents while InstallShield Professional has to use an activated seat for each build agent or InstallShield Premiere gets you only 10 instead of unlimited.... well it would you baffle my mind how that's fair.

Saturday, January 09, 2010 2:55 PM by Christopher Painter

# re: More Information about InstallShield LE for Visual Studio

I finally found time to install VS2010 and IS2010 and I think my concern about command line builds may be not founded.  An msbuild targets file and iscmdbld.exe is indeed installed so maybe the TFS TeamBuild integration will be what it should.

On the positive side, I found an icon called IS 2010 LE for VS 2008 but when I followed the directions, the project type wasn't actually there.

On the negative side, this version of IS is realy, really, really limited sometimes in wierd ways.

Like I can understand not to give InstallScript away, but why support EXE and VBSCRIPT CA's but not DLL CA's?   Then it restricts your sequencing even worse the VDPROJ does.

Then it's annoying that your only allowed to have 1 feature.

Oh, and why support IIS metabase configuration but not SQL script execution?

Anyways, this is an interesting concept but I'm thinking it won't actually be very useful.  Personally if it could create merge module projects and allow describing IIS, SQL, XML changes and CustomActions in those projects it would be a very useful tool to me for distributed authoring while I use InstallShield Premiere for my core installer team.

Of course I wish WiX had something like this so you could use the UI to do most of your heavy lifting while still allowing you to markup the xml if needed.

Saturday, January 09, 2010 8:55 PM by Christohper Painter