Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Visual Studio 2013 now supports Installer Projects

Desktop applications and Windows Services have relied on Visual Studio's installer projects. The installer projects (to state the obvious) allowed an installer to be created for an application. This reliance on installer projects lasted until Visual Studio 2012 when Microsoft ceased supporting installer projects.

On June 15, 2014, Microsoft released version 1.0.0.0 of Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects. To quote Microsoft's download web page, "This official Microsoft extension provides support for Visual Studio Installer Projects in Visual Studio 2013."

Subsequent to this, developers who had moved to Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2013 were forced to use Install Shield Limited Edition or WiX in order to create installers for "desktop applications" (non-store applications). Another approach to delivering installer projects was to build code in Visual Studio 2013 and create the installer projects using Visual Studio 2010.

There is a blog with regard to Visual Studio and specifically Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension. Numerous comments under this blog ask whether the installer projects extensions work with Visual Studio 2012. That remains to be seen -- for those unable to move from Visual Studio 2012 to Visual Studio 2013.

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