Question

I’m not that long into programming, so excuse me if that’s an stupid question.

I know there are several setup creators out there, like the default Visual Studio Installer Project, InstallShield, NSIS etc., but I thought that it would be cool if I have my own solution.

Let’s say I would like to make my own installer creator, a tool where I can add several files I’d like to install and defining an own script system (propably XML-based). Creating a tool that packs all the files I added to.. let’s say a zip is an easy step. But how am I able to develop something that builds an executable? How is this being achieved?

Any advices and helpful tips are appreciated!

Answer 1

Not sure wether that satisfies your needs. This is how i append some data to a file named filename based on an executable named BaseExecutable. The data could be a .zip or anything else. The BaseExecutable is some sort of installer (in my case a Win32 executable) which reads the appended data from itself. Starting location of the data can be found at positions 44,45,46,47 of the resulting executable. I didn’t try that with any .NET exe

public void Create(string Filename, string BaseExecutable)
{
    FileStream Source = new FileStream(BaseExecutable, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read);

    file = new FileStream(Filename, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None);

    byte[] buffer = new byte[65536];
    Source.Read(buffer, 0, 48);
    file.Write(buffer, 0, 44);

    writer = new BinaryWriter(file, Encoding.ASCII);
    writer.Write((uint)Source.Length);

    int count;
    while ( (count=Source.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length))>0)
        file.Write(buffer, 0, count);

    // append custom data here ...
}