I've written an MVC core app. The next step is to wrap it in an MSI and distribute it to clients. The problem is this: I can't seem to find any built in way capture all the content files and dll's automatically and wrap them in an MSI. I've tried so far windows installer and wix (heat, to be precise) and both of them doesn't seem to have a built in way to work with .net core. Did Microsoft just decided it's not important enough or am I missing something important? I could try to put all the output and all the dependencies, file by file, but that would be hell to maintain, with the new Nuget approach there are many many dll's required for a project, together with all the content it becomes enormous. Any help would be appreciated
I'm still adjusting to this "modern" world and part of me wonders why you'd want to package a .NET core app as an MSI. I'd think you'd be running it in a docker container or windows server app (appx) in the "cloud" or on nano server which doesn't even support MSI. For actual windows servers I'd assume regular old .NET. (Which I still fondly love.)
That said, I have an open source program called IsWiX (CodePlex) and have a very simple pattern for creating ASP.NET website installers (see video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgDf1kv8a-4) and I'd be willing to work with you to come up with a similiar story for asp.net-core mvc apps.
From what I read, .net core apps also have msbuild publish profile support. That is what I use to create the model from which I author my installers. From there I just drag drop my files into IsWiX and let it author all the XML for me.
FWIW website installers have always had a lot of files. Even before nuget and npm a website developer might add a few thousand files to their project just by adding say Infragistics. I once worked on an installer with over 300,000 files. Yikes! I always wished we had a way of just creating an uncompresssed archive of this stuff and IIS could see if as a directory but to my knowledge that never happened.
The MSI world is a declarative world where we need to explicitly list each of those files. Web developers live in a world where they just say "publish" and don't care about those details. That is the gap that I try to bridge with IsWiX.
Related
I have developed a WPF application and the customer is planning to deploy the application on DVDs.
My application is really simple and doesn't require any setup process, but I need to assure that if the client doesn't have .NET 3 installed that it will be installed locally (from the DVD) before starting the WPF application.
So, what's the easiest was to add the .NET 3/3.5 package locally on my DVD and assure it'll be installed before running my application? Remeber that my application will be a standalone application.
when you use the publish option...
The Project Properties has a place to specify the dependancies that will need to be downloaded
then you simply check the boxes
there are other more complex ways to go abaout this but for .net 3.5 you don't have to go far
I would suggest using Visual Studio Setup Project for creating a setup package which would check for prerequisites and provide fundamental features like file system, registries, scripting. It is very easy to get started with. Take a look here for a brief walkthrough.
i created an application using c# language. this application is doing a task like report generation.i am using that application exe file directly to run the application.i never installed that application in my system. without installation of that application, i can use it in my system.then why people are installing a software/application in systems.please clarify me. so that i can differentiate the MSI installation and direct use of exe file.
Install in cs jargon means guided setup, so what you do is already, basically, installing. Installing may involve much more complicated steps than simple copy/paste of bin directory or unzipping in some folder. installation process may contain the below processes:
Controlling user license
Registry key control
Database creation
Com components registration
....
and much more.
But the core concept remains the same: guided setup of all necessary components of your program to run it properly. So, if the only thing your program needs is a binaries folder, copy/paste is your install.
What you are doing is called an "xcopy" deployment. It was all the rage when .NET came out but it has serious limitations.
Windows Installer (MSI) is a windows platform service / SDK that aimed to create a declarative framework for consistent installer behavior. Simply put instead of learning how to write script to automate install/uninstall (and making a lot of mistakes along the way) you leverage MSI to tell it I have a product named X with feature Y that has these files Z in these directories along with a shortcut and some registry entries and let MSI do the rest for you.
I am using visual studio web project to install my web application and do some customization like modifying connection string in web.config file during install time.
Now, My requirement is to create a patch for the web application so that next time the web installer only the changed files.
Is there is any one to do it using visualk studio 2010 ide or any other way.We can't use third party products like Installshield,wix,innosetup etc.
Please suggest.
Visual Studio doesn't support patches for setup projects. It supports only major upgrades.
If you really don't want to use other setup authoring tools, you can try creating the patch manually. You can read more about this here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370578(VS.85).aspx
But it won't be easy.
If it is just Web project, I would recommend re-deploy instead of patching. Meaning you just deploy new version of site, above the previous one.
Except some really comprehensive case that strategy works all the time. I use simple xcopy deploy for all my projects.
You can write a mini C# app to do it. You can have the list of assembly files in a configuration. On loading of the app, it checks the timestamp difference between server and client files. On finding the change, the mini app pushes the changes file.
Hope, it will resolve your issue
There may be better suited solutins to deply websites than using an installer. For one, there's Web Deploy.
It's main purpose is deploying web applications to IIS and it allows you to modify key configuration values through a simple UI.
Web Deploy works with deployment packages; a big zip containing your application and some meta data to help install it. On deployment it will diff the deployed site with the data in the deployment package to update existing files, add new ones and remove obsolete files.
You can build deployment packages directly from Visual Studio and/or from MSBuild, using your favorite build server.
Web Deploy works really well when you need to deploy often or when you have to delegate deployment to IT staff.
Customizing Web Deployment package is a bit tedious though, you may find a blog post I wrote about this useful.
For simpler situations, I recommend good version control practices and xcopy deployment.
If you tag what you deploy to your server, you can zip up the changed files since last deployment and copy those to your server.
I have an application depending on the Google Data API SDK (which are .dll's).
When I publish the application (Debug > Build Solution), my EXE-file only works on another computer when I copy the references in the same directory which I have included in my Visual Studio project.
The application is querying my Google Calendar for the current event, so I want to be able to run it from a memory stick.
Is there a solution so I can include those DLL's in one single EXE (make it kind of portable?).
Thank you so much!
You could potentially use ilmerge to do this. However, I don't know what the ramifications of this are in terms of licensing, particularly if you're going to distribute the app.
I would personally vote for keeping them separate, and just deploying them next to each other (whether in an installer or on a memory stick).
Most of the libraries Google provides are open-source and hosted on Google Code. This means you can download the source code and include it in the same project as the .exe project. That eliminates the need to have references to other dlls.
Here is the link to the .Net Google Code project. You'll need svn to check out the latest source code. The svn command is here:
svn checkout http://google-gdata.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ google-gdata-read-only
I am wondering how can I make a setup project for each of these projects
Asp.net mvc 2.0
C# cmd line
Application C# web-service
I am using VS 2010 ultimate and I know that I can use the the free edition of install shield for at least the cmd line application. I am not sure about the other 2. I also know about the setup project that you can use. I just need a lot more than the basics so I am not sure how to make either one do these things.
So here is some criteria that each of my setups should be able to do.
Asp.net mvc 2.0 criteria
free (I really don't want to pay for an installer - you can list them just so I am aware of them).
Terms of service
Ability to force a user to setup certain settings. Like connection string, smtp settings. So they should be able to type it in through the setup wizard and the web.config should be updated based on this.
When it installs the stuff it should all be .dlls for all the C# code.
C# cmd line criteria
All criteria as above
I am not sure if this has to be done in the code but I have a html file that contains a template for a message. The path to this file is in the web.config so I a person needs to set this path each time they install it. I tried to do this in code but I could not figure out how to make it find the right path in development and the right path in production. It seems like If you run in VS the path is different.
Web-service
Pretty much everything I covered in the first 2 ones.
Thanks
If I were you, I would choose WiX as a platform for your installers for all these applications. Some reasoning behind this:
it is XML-based, that is, friendly to source control, diffing and merging
it has rich set of tools for most of scenarios you might need (harvesting lots of files, creating upgrades and patches, creating multi-lingual installs, etc.)
it is free and open source
it is production-ready (at least, version 3.0 - later versions are still in beta)
it is used by Microsoft to create installations for such products like MS Office
it has rich community at wix-users#lists.sourceforge.net and StackOverflow
it integrates into the VS like a charm
it is friendly to build engines like NAnt and MSBuild
VS setup project is not my choice because:
it is very limited in set of features-
it encourages bad practices like Installer classes
finally, it was retired by Microsoft
I'm not familiar with InstallShield Limited edition, though.
Hope this overview will help you finding the best option for your case.