I have an application that was developed in Visual Studio 2008 using ASP.NET. Part of it is a website that uses IIS 6 and accesses a database in SQL Express 2008 and the other part is a standalone application that allows users to add information to the database. Is it possible to create an installation package that clients could use to install everything themselves without purchasing some expensive program like InstallAware or InstallSheild? Can this be done within Visual Studio?
The goal is to have SQL Express and IIS (and of course .NET) bundled with the application so that all necessary technology is set up upon install.
The best bet would be to use a combination of WiX and the Setup Project that comes built in with Visual Studio. It’s not that robust, but you can do most of the database stuff with custom actions and WiX has some IIS support.