Developer Solutions for Web and Other

Bootstrapping is the creation of a wrapper installer around already existing installars or files. It's useful if you have multiple installation files that you'll like the user to install in on step. The Bootstrapper itself is a .exe installer file, it also may have .SED file which contains details of the contents of the .exe. There are a few applications out there to generate a bootstrapper, the most simple I've seen is the an app called IEXpress . IExpress Is actually installed on windows (System32/iexpress.exe). This creates an installer, you tell it what files you wish it to include in the installation. I've only played with this so far and it appears to me that the isntaller can only install upto 2 setup.exes. You can include as many files as you like, but the files cannot have the same name, because of this you will probably need to rename your setup.exes to something else because you cannot have 2 files with the same name. After you've included all the files...

Attributes those snippets of code you see in .NET classes in square brackets at the top of Class or Method, one of the most common examples is [WebMethod] to indicate that the current method is a WebMethod . The Attribute is in fact a class that inherits from System.Attribute . The Attribute is read in at Runtime, Reflection takes care of this. Attributes are useful for flagging types, conditions when and when not to use certain methods like the WebMethod.

Latest Release ('Rosario' November CTP msdn) now has Visual Studio Integration. WiX Tutorial (tramontana). WiX documentation (sourceforge). WiX and Visual Studio (msdn forum). WiX integration in Visual Studio using Votive (Votive blog). WiX integration (msdn). WiX Forum. Building setup packages for Visual Studio project templates and starter kits ( Aaron Stebner's WebBlog) WiX Tallow tool WiX is a methodology to write installers. WiX has a compiler/linker (candle/light) which may give the installer writer some validation before deployment. The contents of the end installer (.msi) are edited using an XML file. I haven't found WiX to be advantageous over the ordinary Visual Studio Setup Project. Visual Studios SDK has a project template (from Votive) for creating WiX installers. This project template gives you the skeletol wix file to start and the build commands are built into the project, all you've to do is create new GUIDs ,these guids are only for the installer,...