Why are the current installer tools better than the VFP Setup Wizard?


The Setup Wizard provided in Visual FoxPro 3, 5, and 6 was a basic and often quirky tool that could be coaxed into delivering your products to your customers. If you could live within the design limitations, it was sufficient. Compared to all of the tools discussed in the previous section, the Setup Wizard looks obsolete, and does not support many of the features we now demand from our installation packages.

The first advantage is you no longer need to copy all the files you plan to deploy in the release to a separate directory. Modern installers let you specify which files to distribute from the various folders you have on your development machine. You also get to specify where on the target system they go and this can be different from the development directory structure. Modern installers allow you to direct files to the common Windows folders like Program Files, Windows System, Start Up, Windows Temp, Common Files, Start Menu, Send To, Fonts, and many others predefined by the operating system. The current installers also determine the location of these folders when the installation routine is run on the customer ‚ s production machine. The Setup Wizard only allows the Application folder and the Windows System folder.

The Setup Wizard also only allows for all files or no files. You do not have a choice in the matter. Current installers allow the user to pick what ‚“features ‚½ they want installed. Much like the options: typical, all, or custom. Picking custom allows the user to further tailor what is installed. You can define what these options are and what files are installed when the option is specified.

The Setup Wizard setups do not perform some of the basic fundamentals like creating optional shortcuts on the desktop, updating the Windows Registry, updating INI configuration files, setting up file extension associations, or creating ODBC drivers. Developers have written workaround utilities to eliminate this shortcoming using Visual FoxPro executables to manipulate the registry using WinAPI calls and Windows Scripting Host (WSH). These utilities are called from the post-install process. This is more code to maintain and support. Using the current tools eliminates this maintenance and support.

Note ‚  

One feature missing in the VFP 7 version of InstallShield Express ‚ Limited Edition (actually it is one of the ‚“limitations ‚½ of the Limited Edition) is it cannot run a post installation process. Many reasons developers ran post-installation executables have been integrated in the base tool, but you still may want to run processes to make database structural changes or data conversions. The users can manually run these routines, but it is something they need to remember using an InstallShield Express routine.

Runtimes for Visual FoxPro 7 and 8 are not supported by the Setup Wizard. The Setup Wizard selection for the inclusion of the runtimes only knows about the Visual FoxPro runtimes for the version of Visual FoxPro you are running. If you wanted these newer runtimes you need to include the DLL files in the distribution tree.




Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions
Deploying Visual FoxPro Solutions
ISBN: 1930919328
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 232

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