Hi,

I was wondering what people are using these days to create their Windows installers.

I used InstallShield Express for a number of years, but eventually got tired of fighting it and it's various bugs.

In recent years I've been using Wise Installation Express 7, but I'm getting increasingly frustrated with it. I've had it fail to update files in a recent install, and the project editor UI has a number of annoying problems, such as fixed size dialogs that are not wide enough to see long paths in input fields.

Frans, you mentioned elsewhere in this forum that you where going to switch to NSIS for LLBLGen Pro v2.5. How did it go? Any thoughts? (I used LLBLGen Pro 2.5, and recently moved to 2.6, and whatever installer your using works great from an end user's point of view.)

Anyone with experience with INNO Setup?

I'm also aware of WiX, but I tend to shy away from anything XML based. Trying to program anything in XML makes my brain hurt!

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Regards, Bruce

nsis rocks. It's free, has a simple language and is well documented. On top of that, there are numerous extensions which allow you to add more functionality, like checks for this or that, call into a dll etc.

Notepad++ has color coding for nsis, so that helps as well.

It also depends on the installer complexity you need of course, but most installers simply unpack files into a folder or series of folders, perhaps create registry keys and add shortcuts to a menu. All that is very easy with nsis.

The major culprit with installers is the windows installer service. That service is so incredibly bad, every installer which uses it is terribly slow and complex to write.

Inno setup is similar to nsis but has less features and not that much extensions. I'd give nsis a try first if I were you.

Hi Frans,

Thanks for your comments. I've downloaded NSIS to try, and I'm working my way through its documentation. Looks like it will do what I need.

I've also downloaded Notepad++. I'd heard of this program before, but had never tried it until now. Very nice. I think it's just become my new general purpose text editor!

Thanks again.

Regards, Bruce