Creating an Installer

The easiest way to create an installer for an application is to add a setup project to the solution containing the application. You can manually add a setup project to an open solution by selecting File, Add Project, New Project from Visual Basic .NET’s menu system, selecting Setup and Deployment Projects as the project type, and then selecting setup project as the template for the new project. You will then have an empty setup project included in your open solution.

To make things even easier, Visual Basic .NET provides the Setup Project Wizard, which not only adds a setup project to an application, but also populates the important parts of the project with the information needed to create a standard setup package from the application. You can then customize the setup project as needed, but the bulk of the work will have been done for you by the wizard.

In this appendix, we will show you how to use the Setup Project Wizard to create installers for Windows Application projects and Web Application projects. Due to the potential complexity and many options available, an exhaustive discussion of creating setup projects from scratch is beyond the scope of this appendix; however, the Visual Basic .NET Help system contains step-by-step walkthroughs of manually creating installers. Look for the help topic Installers, walkthrough.