Chapter 4: Setup Tool Roundup

Overview

Back in the golden days a developer could literally copy files from their development machine to a floppy disk, and then take that disk to a customer location and copy the files to the customer computers. It worked and was extremely efficient. Today more and more our customers expect us to deliver a professional setup, just like Microsoft, Intuit, Symantec, and even smaller players do in the world of shrink-wrapped software.

All the planning, preparation, development, and testing culminate with the realization you need to generate a setup for your application. Do you wait until the last minute to select the right setup tool or research in advance for this important selection?

Selecting the right setup tool or tools can be as important as the selection of developer tools used to create your applications or components , and architecting your solutions. Why? Simple: you can spend hours creating a setup only to find out it is missing a critical show- stopping feature. Learning the features supported by the various setup tools can take days. Once you select a setup you think does the job, you need to learn the way it works, which takes more time. It is entirely possible you will spend as much time selecting the tool and learning how to use it as you do creating the solution in the first place.

This chapter attempts to provide you with a comprehensive list of features available in various setup tools and a partial list of tools available in the market place. We attempt to let you know what features each tool supports, their retail cost, and where you can find more information about each product. We finish the chapter with reasons why the Visual FoxPro Setup Wizard is absolutely obsolete and a story about one company who spent 40 non-billable hours purchasing and learning several setup tools all because one project needed two specific features in the setup.