I am in love! Of all the products I have had the pleasure to review as editor-in-chief of .NET Developers Journal, InstallShield Developer has gone the furthest toward reaffirming my faith in the software development industry. Installing the product was a snap, learning to use it was a breeze, and the range of features it supports is absolutely mind-boggling.

My experience began with a 10-minute download of the evaluation version of the product from the InstallShield Web site Click Here!. The file was about 159MB in size and I am on a relatively slow ADSL connection, so this seemed about right. Once the file was downloaded I was able to complete the installation in just a few minutes by running through the installer and accepting all of the defaults.

Before accepting the defaults, I investigated some of the other installation options and was a little disappointed with the old version numbers of some of the technologies that were bundled along with the installer. For example, MDAC 2.6 was on the list and Jet (Microsoft's Access database engine) was on the list, but MSDE was nowhere to be found. Immediately after finishing my installation, however, the automatic software update feature found that MDAC 2.7 and MSDE 2000 were both available as freely downloadable updates for the application, so my enthusiasm returned at once to its previous level!

This support for automatic updates is, perhaps, one of InstallShield Developer's most appealing features. With just a few clicks of the mouse, administrators and developers can add features to their installers that will allow them to automatically remain up to date by having them query a predetermined Internet location at regular intervals for software updates and patches. For organizations that don't wish to add the complexity of maintaining these Internet update sites, InstallShield offers a service that will do this for them. The choice is left purely up to the administrator or developer building the installer.

The first way that I tried using InstallShield Developer was via its integration with Visual Studio .NET 2003. As shown in Figure 1, InstallShield Developer adds an "InstallShield Developer Projects" entry to the Visual Studio Project Types list. Within this list there are several specific types of projects that can be created. Given my personal focus on mobility technologies, the first type I played around with was the "Smart Device Setup Project."

Developers familiar with the process of manually hacking together CAB files to distribute their .NET Compact Framework applications will find InstallShield Developer's GUI support for these same features tremendously appealing. I particularly liked the product's out-of-the-box abilities to:

Add entries to the Windows CE registry

Once I was finished playing around with the .NET Compact Framework support, I exited Visual Studio .NET and started up the stand-alone instance of Install-Shield Developer. Probably the best way for a novice InstallShield user to become familiar with the product is by using the Project Wizard, and this is exactly what I did. In less than 15 minutes, I had created a fully functional installer for a fairly sophisticated stand-alone .NET executable using just this tool. It was exceptionally easy to use.

When the Project Wizard finishes, you are dropped into the full IDE for InstallShield Developer, with your newly created project already open. It was at this point that I began familiarizing myself with the vast list of options and settings that can be configured, as shown in Figure 2. In addition to the desktop and server equivalents of the options described above, a developer can use these settings to configure such things as: