How to create an installer from Visual Studio

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How to create an installer from Visual Studio


1. Open the Visual Studio solution
Open the solution for which you want to create the install package.




2. Add an Advanced Installer Project to the solution
Once the Visual Studio solution is loaded:

From the New Project dialog select Advanced Installer Project
In the Solution field select Add to solution option
In the “Name” field you can write a name for your project
Press [ OK ] to add the project to the solution

By default, when adding an Advanced Installer Project, the build output of the solution will not be automatically added to the installer project, to do this you must:

Go to the Files and Folders section of the Installer Project
Press "Add Project Output" button
Select the “Primary Output” and “References”
Press [ OK ]



Following these steps, Advanced Installer Extension for Visual Studio adds in the installer project all application references except the Microsoft .NET assemblies.




3. Create the first install package
In Visual Studio select "Build" > "Build Solution" option to start the build.

After the build is completed successfully, it will create two main files: HelloWorld.exe which is the output from the C# project and Installer Project.msi which is
the installation package.




4. Edit the installer project
Using the Advanced Installer Project viewer, you can edit basic information about your installer like Product Details, Launch Conditions, Install Parameters, and
much more..



Let's suppose we have an Enterprise edition of Advanced Installer. By default, the installer project will be created based on a Freeware license. Since we want to use
features from the Enterprise edition, like selecting a theme for the installation dialogs, we will need to upgrade our project type:

Press the [ Edit in Advanced Installer ] button to open your installer project in Advanced Installer
From the “Project” menu select “Options...”
Navigate to the Project Type Tab and select Enterprise
Press the [ OK ] button




Now, that we have an Enterprise project we have full access to all the available Advanced Installer Enterprise features.

Go to Themes Page
From the right view select the desired theme and variation for your installer dialogs
Save the project and exit Advanced Installer

Visual Studio will ask you if you want to reload the installer project since it was modified. Press the [ Yes ] button.

5. Add another Visual Studio Project to the solution
If an Advanced Installer Project is added to a solution, it will automatically import the build output and all useful information related to the projects from the solution.
If later, the existing projects are modified, or another project is added to the solution the import operation must be redone.
Let's add a new Visual Studio project to the solution:

From the “New Project” dialog in Visual Studio select "Visual C#" > "WPF App"
In the “Solution” field select Add to solution option
Press the [ OK ] button. The new project will be added to the solution
Rebuild the solution





6. Create the final install package
Include the second project in the installer package:

Select the Installer Project.aip file from the "Solution Explorer"
Check that both projects output builds are included in the installer package from the “Files and Folders” page
Rebuild the solution
Test the new installation package

The newly created installer will contain all the projects from the solution.




7. Automatically import .VDPROJ files (optional)
If you have solutions that contain old Visual Studio Deployment projects (.vdproj) you can automatically convert them to an Advanced Installer project and have it included in your
solution, replacing the old VDPROJ. Just open the solution in Visual Studio, with our Advanced Installer VS extension installed, and VS will prompt you to accept the conversion from
VDPROJ to AIPROJ (Advanced Installer VS project).
The new project Advanced Installer project will contain all the resources from the old VDPROJ. If you want to customize it more just use the "Edit in Advanced Installer" button,
available when you open the .aip file in Visual Studio.

8. Add project output of a .NET core project to your setup project (optional)
If you have a .NET Core project in your Visual Studio solution, here is how to include its output in the setup project:
Go to the “Files and Folders" section of the Installer Project, click on "Add Project Output" and check "Publish Profile" option:
If there is no publish profile previusly created, you will be asked to create one:



Next, you will be asked where do you want to publish:



Choose "Folder" option in order to publish your application to a local folder.
Then, provide the path to the publish folder:



After publishing the application, go back to "Add Project Output" and select the newly created publish profile:



The final step is to build the Advanced Installer project in order to update the output files.