WiX Alternatives: After describing WiX's Burn feature, I started thinking that it might not be what you need to get your job done. It is developer heavy and involved - though it should be perfectly manageable for a developer to implement what is needed without too many problems. Flexibility is very high.
Commercial deployment tool options Installshield and Advanced Installer have GUI-interfaces you can use to create a setup.exe
which will kick off MSI files with parameters you gather.
Installshield
In Installshield there is a rather new feature in recent editions called Installshield Suite Projects. I am not sure what editions it is available in (higher editions - for example "Premium"). It allows you to install a variety of files "in sequence": MSI
, MSP
, EXE
, MSU
, etc...
.
Though I have never used it much, I am pretty sure you can create a suite GUI fairly easily, and control what dialogs show from what setup. I would install them all silently with a command line. Do check out at least the first link below - the screen shots. It should give you the basic idea of things.
Some Links:
Advanced Installer
Advanced Installer features advanced options to include prerequisites and packages with your main MSI installer, and allows you to create new dialogs just like Installshield. Yet again I haven't had the time to test it fully, but below are some pointers on its use.
The features for this center around the views "Prerequisites
", "Build
" and "Dialogs
". In the "Build
" view set EXE output. In "Prerequisites
" select the top level "Packages
" item to get a list of built-in, available prerequisites. Right click "Pre-Install
" to add your own package. I am not familiar with the dialog details, but you can work on them in the "Dialogs
" view. Not rocket science is the good news.
Some Links:
I will stop at that. Too many links already.
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