There's no way provided to do this within Visual Studio. There are really two ways to deal with the issue:

• 3rd-party products to handle this, e.g. WinZip Self-Extractor (http://www.winzip.com/prodpagese.htm)
• Just distribute the MSI

I do the second: the setup.exe that gets built with your installer only does one thing that I can tell, which is to run the MSI. So now I just set the MSI up as the installer. Download, double-click, and it goes.

You may use the tool "IExpress" which is included in Windows for free. Just enter "iexpress" in the Run dialogue, and follow the wizard. It will help you create a self-extracting archive containing the .exe and .msi file.

If you create an SED file at the end of the wizard, you may include iexpress as a post build event in your Visual Studio project.

Note that self-extracting archives may not work as supposed when using the .exe bootstrapper created by Visual Studio 2008, due to the fact that it doesn't wait for the MSI installation to complete, and causing the self-extracters to delete the extracted .msi file before it has finished installing. However, if you use Visual Studio 2005 to generate the setup files, this should not cause any problem.

There's no way provided to do this within Visual Studio. There are really two ways to deal with the issue:

• 3rd-party products to handle this, e.g. WinZip Self-Extractor (http://www.winzip.com/prodpagese.htm)
• Just distribute the MSI

I do the second: the setup.exe that gets built with your installer only does one thing that I can tell, which is to run the MSI. So now I just set the MSI up as the installer. Download, double-click, and it goes.

You may use the tool "IExpress" which is included in Windows for free. Just enter "iexpress" in the Run dialogue, and follow the wizard. It will help you create a self-extracting archive containing the .exe and .msi file.

If you create an SED file at the end of the wizard, you may include iexpress as a post build event in your Visual Studio project.

Note that self-extracting archives may not work as supposed when using the .exe bootstrapper created by Visual Studio 2008, due to the fact that it doesn't wait for the MSI installation to complete, and causing the self-extracters to delete the extracted .msi file before it has finished installing. However, if you use Visual Studio 2005 to generate the setup files, this should not cause any problem.

Oh man, I looked everywhere for that and couldn't find it! I can't believe it just comes with Windows :) Thanks for the tip on that, Sven!

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