
Visual Studio Installer -- Custom .exe file to be executed during installation
Hello Hammad,
there are several was to do this, unfortunately, they are all rather
complicated. VSI does not directly support it.
1. You could use a wrapper program that first calls you VSI installer, waits
for it to finish and then execute your EXE. I realize that this requires a
lot of coding and knowledge.
2. Using a tool called ORCA from the Windows Installer SDK, you can include
a so-called "commit custom action" . This is a command (or script) that can
be included in your MSI file; it executes only when your setup was
successful. You need to know quite a lot about the internals of MSI files
and custom actions. A good place to start is the follwing book:
"
VB/VBA Developer's Guide to the Windows Installer"
by Mike Gunderloy; Sybex (ISBN: 0782127452)
It has a small example (launching a messagebox when you setup was sucessful)
that you could adapt to start your exe.(The SDK can be found at:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/sdks/platform/wininst.asp)
3. Setup tools like InstallShield 2.0 for Windows Installer can easily
author events that are fired when buttons in your setup are pressed. You
could author the event that occurs when the "Finish"-button of the last
dialog in your setup is pressed to execute a custom action that, in turn,
executes your EXE. InstallShield can import VSI-generated MSI files, so you
wouldn't have to completely re-write your setup.
All of these methods are not really easy to handle. I'm sorry that I cannot
give you step-by-step instructions, but the book I mentioned above can give
you the background you need to do change VSI-generated setups to do (almost)
anything you want.
Regards,
Uwe
Uwe Baumann
Microsoft Developer Support Germany
Quote:
> Hi ALL,
> I am sorry if this topic is already discussed,
> I want to execute my own custom .exe file(s) after my installation is
> completed (installtio prepared by Viusal Studio -- Visual Basic Installer)
> Any tip will be highly obliged
> Regards
> Hammad.