I need to install a USB driver with an application, and I’m using a Visual Studio 2005 Setup Project to create the installer.
The driver only needs to be installed sufficient enough so that when the USB device is plugged in, Windows will go off doing it’s “installing device” routine and do the rest of the job. It would be okay also to have the setup finish and then the user connects the device when required with the driver install completing then. However the user shouldn’t be prompted to find a driver location.
The USB drivers I have are available either as plain .sys / .inf files, or as a full installer (.msi together with a setup.exe wrapper). The full installer deals with combinations of operating systems and languages, but the application is for internal use and I can limit the target OS to Windows XP.
Would it be better just to run the available installer via a custom action, or to install via the .inf file somehow (I’m not sure how to do that)?
Answering my own question (although I don’t know if it’s the best option), I have discovered it is possible to write custom Boostrapper components for Visual Studio.
For example: Using the Bootstrapper to wrap a Windows Installer package
The idea being that you can include your MSI (in my case the driver installer) as part of the boostrap of the setup.exe that a VS Setup project generates. By creating a custom bootstrapper to do this, I can then select this as part of the prerequisites property in the setup project.
Gave it a go and it works fine.