InstallShield Limited Edition - problems with General Information page and crashing VS 2010

I think I'll soon will regret the day I chose to use InstallShield and not WiX.

I had a bit of experience with WiX, and it seemed a bit complicated to use, so when the time came for a real project, I chose to use the new Flexera InstallShield LE for Visual Studio 2010. At first it seemed so easy, I created and 开发者_Python百科compiled the first installation project without any issues. It even managed to extract COM information from some 3rd party library (which was compiled using VC 6, as far as I know).

But when I added some more InstallShield installation (ISL) projects to the same solution, strange problems appeared. If I edit the General information page of one ISL project and then click Save All button, suddenly the information gets messed up with parts from other ISL projects, some fields show up as UNITITIALIZED STRING, and some fields just mix up. And when I open the other ISL projects, I see, that the info is messed up there, too. The only solution seems to be to unload all other ISL projects while editing the General information page.

The problem number two: crashes. My project is a mixed C++/C# application. Sometimes while editing unmanaged C++ code, Visual Studio just crashes on some certain operations (like commenting out some blocks of code, cutting, pasting). I even installed Visual Studio 2010 SP1, but that did not help. The crashes completely stopped occurring when I unloaded all ISL projects.

Anyway, I am frustrated and now I have a choice:

• stay with ISL, create my own executable which will get installed and will run regsvr32. Still I'll have to live with Visual Studio crashes and General Information page problems.

• move to Windows Installer XML. But I am not sure at what stage it is now, won't I have the same problems? Can WiX register COMs for me (also can it register 32 bit dlls on 64 bit systems using regsvr32 from syswow64 folder)? Is it stable with Visual Studio 2010?

I will really appreciate your suggestions about what should I do - stay with ISL or move to WiX, especially from those who are experienced WiX users on Visual Studio 2010.

I would highly recommend migrating your setup installers to use Windows Installer XML (WiX).
I did this years ago and have never looked back. :)

Wix v3.5 is very stable. I haven't had any problems with its integration with Visual Studio, among a lot of its other features.

It's open source and the community is very helpful.

You can use heat.exe to extract COM information from a file. http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/heat.htm

You can call regsvr32.exe for example on the target machine using the built-in Quiet Execution CustomAction
http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/qtexec.htm

That link also documents how to run 64-bit executables.

You can use the [SystemFolder] property to execute a file in c:\windows\syswow64 for example.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372055.aspx

WiX's DTF technology is perfect for writing msi custom actions in c#.

HTH.