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Why use Windows Installer?


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jcruelty

jcruelty
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Posted 20 March 2007 - 01:44

Hi,

I am currently evaluating commercial installer solutions & am wondering what the benefits of adopting an MSI authoring tool vs a non MSI tool would be. Our application is targeted at individual users, not corporations, so we don't care about group deployment. The options I'm looking at are:

InstallAware http://www.installaware.com
Lindersoft SetupBuilder - http://www.lindersoft.com
Tarma Installer - http://www.tarma.com/

The main things I'm wondering are:

1) are MSI installers necessarily smaller than non-MSI installers, because the MSI installers make use of the underlying engine included with Windows?

2) do MSI installers support multi-lingual support in one package? or do I have to create a bunch of separate installers?

Apologies if these questions are not well-posed. I've been reading about MSI but am not yet sure what the relationship is between the authoring software that creates the installer & MSI; so I don't know if things like multi-lingual support can be supported at a higher level within the created exe even if they are not supported by Windows installer directly.

thanks,

AP

Stefan Krueger

Stefan Krueger

    InstallSite.org

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Posted 20 March 2007 - 16:57

1 - Windows Installer setups don't need a special runtime engine, but if you target older Windows versions you may need to ship the Windows Installer engine, which adds significant overhead. Some non-MSI tools have better compression.

2 - Yes (but not all tools can create them). You need to use a setup.exe to launch the setup in the correct language.

Windows Installer better supports elevated installs which is important on Windows Vista (see UAC).