Installer custom actions

Now, highlight SampleInstaller and click on Properties tab seen right side of the project. The below View would be seen, Now, fill the fields appropriately as per the description mentioned when you highlight the field. Make sure you select appropriate platform using TargetPlatform.

If you want to install this installer on 64 bit machine as 64 bit application then select x64 instead of x This allows user to perform upgrade operation of the product. Hence, make sure that ProductCode is changed when changing the Version, if you planned to perform upgrade. To configure that:. Also, we want to stop the service when the product is about to get uninstalled. If we want to achieve them, we need to write custom code in SampleWinService project using appropriate class and methods like below, Override OnAfterInstall method of ProjectInstaller class and perform start operation to enable automatic windows service start after installation.

Similarly, override OnBeforeUninstall method to stop the running service at the time of product uninstallation. Upgrade is the process of installing or uninstalling required feature or component or binaries or file from the existing installation. For example I could run the installer using the following:. With that you are all done well, excluding all the other mirad of properties you can tweak on your installer!

Oh, it must be the time for writing posts on building installers because I just noticed that Dave Glover has posted on building Vista compatible installers for Windows Mobile applications. It is working fine but then how can we assign value for parameter as default if we want to install with user interaction. The process goes a bit like this assumes that you have already created your setup project and have added the primary output of your application : Add an Installer item to your application from the New Item dialog select the Installer template If the Installer item is not currently open, double-click it in the Solution Explorer to open the designer From the Properties grid select the Event view, followed by the event that you want to wire up eg AfterInstall — Double-clicking the drop-down box will create an empty event handler!

However there are more options available and one can add just a plain file, assembly, etc. All these files along with dependencies referred files will be installed on the user system. Step 3: Define the target installation directory by setting 'Default location' That's It The project is ready as such and you can build it and distribute it. Now come some advanced topics and tunings.

Advance Set up Options What if you want to check some condition and conditionally rollback the installation? Step 4: Add custom Actions, click on the custom action icon Custom actions are for adding code that is needed to be executed during installation. Note: One important fact is that we can not run any code before installation starts, any code will run only after the installer dumps code files onto the user's system. To add a custom action click on the custom action icon.

This will open the following window and there we can add a project containing an installer class. To create this project having an installer class, we can make a class library type of project and add an installer class in it from the add new item dialog. From the above two images, you can see a class library project, "my installer" and an installer class in it.

To link this project to the installer project we add a "custom action" which is already shown before. Further, to send a parameter from the installer project to the custom action class we can use a custom action property, "custom action data".

You can receive this data in a class using a context object as follows: Context. Parameters "version" ; Step 5: Configuring automatic upgrades of new builds Often we want to upgrade an old installed application with a new one in the user's systems and this should happen using the new setup file which we will distribute to users.

That means the new installer file should automatically delete old files and upgrade new files.