Wise or installshield

WISE is not so bad. It lets you customize your installation much more than InstallShield seems to. Along with this, of course, comes more complexity.

It took some tweaking before I got it to work. The UnWise uninstaller takes some tweaking to make work, also. InstallShield was simple. I ran it once through, and it created an install for the simple program. We are reader-supported so we may receive a commission when you buy through links on our site. You do not pay extra for anything you buy on our site — our commission comes directly from the product owner. Support WizCase to help us guarantee honest and unbiased advice.

Share our site to support us! Our Reviews WizCase includes reviews written by our experts. Referral fees Wizcase may earn an affiliate commission when a purchase is made using our links. Download InstallShield Version: 3. Asked 12 years, 3 months ago. Active 2 years, 6 months ago. Viewed 51k times. Improve this question. Peter Mortensen Mat Nadrofsky Mat Nadrofsky 8, 8 8 gold badges 48 48 silver badges 73 73 bronze badges.

See this older discussion too. I keep finding it amazing how anything relating to deployment of your developed solution to target computers is marked "off topic" everywhere on stackoverflow.

Getting the application you have developed to your end user is a crucial part of delivering software! Stop interfering with people who try to get some help with this process. Look at the amount of upvotes the answers get with relatively few article views. Some people really seek out this information. Thanks Yvette. I'll do my best to maintain this content for as long as it is relevant. It was an attempt to write information that can't be found in books - but that people need to make an informed decision on how to get their software to the end user - "best effort" without claiming to be "right".

I am a "pragmatic in the field" - more than an "expert in the field". Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Related Deployment Topics Before delving into the review of the different tools, here are a few other links with information about the MSI technology itself.

Here is a general description of deployment tasks commonly supported in deployment tools, and a description of why deployment seems to become more and more complicated.

A lot of people seem to think MSI is more trouble than it is worth, and sometimes that can be understandable. The benefits are real - particularly for corporate deployment, but so are some of the problems.

Here is a description I wrote about the major corporate benefits of MSI from serverfault. The article has grown too much, but is hopefully still relevant.

In the same article I wrote about typical real-world design flaws in MSI files a work very much in progress - just a "memory dump" from experiencing "both sides of software": development and deployment. InstallShield Feature rich. Always up to date with latest technologies. Setup Developer oriented. Different editions available. The flagship product AdminStudio provides both setup developer oriented tools as well as repackager oriented tools.

Very good release management , localization and automation features for build process automation. At least better than the competitors. For complex products release management is perhaps the main selling point for InstallShield. You can deliver flavors of all kinds with ease: language versions, oem versions, viewers, application editions, etc Release flags are essentially used to conditionally exclude or include certain parts of the product from each compiled setup - this is often a large part of what is asked for when making professional families of setups.

The release view in Installshield allows full overview of all your different setup types and editions. You see all language versions and release setups delivered for the web one large setup file or for redistributable media external source files and whatever other flavors you have delivered.

Crucially for each release and edition you can override important settings such as product name, product version, package-, product- and upgrade code as well as many other required settings that must dynamically change based on product edition and language version. In many other products this type of release and edition management can be much harder to implement. For simpler setups this type of flexibility might be less important.

The automation API for the product allows it to be easily " remote controlled " from build automation scripts of various types. There are also command line build modules for use on dedicated build servers. Full localization support with string tables used to support different setup languages.

The base dialogs are also provided ready-made in a number of languages costs extra. You only need to localize your own setup content features list captions, any custom dialogs or message boxes, images with text, etc You can deliver a huge multi-lingual setup.

This is not recommended in my experience for several reasons read localization section. The worst problem is that you must localize all new and changed content in all languages before you can deliver the English version. And there are always fixes that require you to rebuild and re-release a single language, and then you want to do so without UAT and QA for all other languages.

It is better to provide separate builds for each language easily implemented. Good community support: User Community Forums. Pretty good GUI, common things are reasonably easy. Very powerful. Somewhat complex.

Limitations of the underlying MSI technology's GUI features cause some snags and annoying limitations, but this is the same for all deployment tools. The root cause is that MSI GUI is implemented using tables of data inside the MSI file itself, and this causes severe limitations with regards to dialog events when compared to the full "event model" for proper Win32 dialogs. Full featured C-style scripting language for custom actions called " Installscript ".

Installscript now compiles to native - or emulated with its own sandbox, not sure which. There is no need to install a runtime like you had to before. Incidentally this runtime was the source of some rather troublesome deployment problems due to runtime corruption - seemingly often DCOM related - and various incompatibilities between different runtime versions.

Flexera Consumer Central for end user setup issues. Although the runtime was a very problematic source of errors, all related problems now seem to have been resolved completely since Installshield 12 and later.

Nicely integrated help in GUI. Very important for such a difficult technology. Often very helpful - especially for dealing with common tasks.

The default binary file storage format allows no real source control or branching unlike WiX which delivers this out of the box. I think there is a way to store the project in text format, but I never used it. Not sure how effective it would be. Without a shadow of a doubt, by far the buggiest of all installation products. In fairness most bugs relate to the special " Installscript MSI " project type that implements a custom dialog model for MSI setups rather than the native, table based GUI which is suppressed.

Please take this to heart, if you still use them - they are particularly hard to upgrade properly first time deployment might be OK, but upgrades are breaking. Other projects types seem to work well. After abandoning Installscript MSI which most people seemed to do , the tool worked quite well for me personally not bug free though. I needed to go for WiX's flexibility and customizability instead of Installshield's ease of use.

There was simply not enough flexibility and control available. Support for Microsoft App-V virtual packages and new virtualization technologies. Allows a few new things compared to a normal application. Application streaming - no local installation on machines - JIT. Use two incompatible software on the same computer.

Updating through the server. Present the application quickly and easily to users. More Microsoft marketing here. Wise Wise is officially retired , but it has been resurrected before. I am still leaving in the summary of the good Wise features: Fast and easy and quite feature rich.

Very good ease of use overall, excellent feature set. Lacking in some very advanced features such as IIS, advanced release management, etc Less code focused than Installshield. Uniquely capable and flexible graphical scripting editor. Well designed setup configuration GUI. Also excellent for small development teams looking for a quick and relatively easy way to get their application deployed.

Sometimes lagging slightly with latest technologies compared to Installshield , but comparatively "bug free". Intuitive GUI, common things are very easy. Very nice handling of installation sequence configuration and custom actions in a script style editor. More GUI scripting, less coding. Rock solid , very few significant bugs. Help resources and community support not on par with InstallShield, but still good. My tool of choice for debugging and prototyping fast, stable, easy to use, great diff features.

And with regards to the diff features allowing binary comparison of two MSI files. The ease-of-use and clarity of the diff viewer was no less than fantastic. For corporate packaging such diff-features can be a very critical part of the job as you have hundreds or even thousands of different software packages to manage in many different versions.