I recently had to struggle with one installation project (which uses most popular product for creating installations: InstallShield) to make it work for product upgrades (migrating from one version to another). In the end it turned out that I needed to use one long package code but was using some other. It wasted my 8 hours (testing and debugging installers is a pain).
Now if I think about it, once you are done all the hard part of coding, all you want to is that correct applications, libraries are copied to target computer and user just runs it. Period. This apparently simple task normally turns out to be a tricky one and ‘being closed to finish date’ makes in even harder.
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Don’t you think deploying a product is made damn difficult on windows which should have been simpler? (or installer really deserves that much attention and I am just being crazy about it?)
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Have you ever used simpler deployment schemes such as ‘copy the folder to wherever you like and run the exe. When you want to remove it, just delete the folder!’? Was it effective and made things simpler?
Painful as it is you need to wrestle with the windows installer for the benefit of your customers. Otherwise you will need to do a lot more work to
Your own custom scripts to solve all these problems eventually become a bigger problem than the installation itself!
I recommend that you check out Wix. It’s not exactly child’s play but it gets the job done. If you install Votive as a visual studio add in you get intellisense to help you strucutre the tags correctly. With the help file you can create pretty functional flexible installations