WiX XNA Installer

NEW POST: XNA 2.0

Strings — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 07:46:06 GMT

Hi Cygon,

Great installer :) I have a feature suggestion though, is it possible to implement a boolean or something that will make it check for and needed, bundle in the XNA 2.0 redistributable instead? Or does it allow you to do that already and I missed it? Any info on this would be much appreciated.

Keep up your great work, your site has been very useful for me, I have used the Nuclex.UserControl for a long time too before I had to switch to XNA 2.0 and so had to stop using it, now I'm using the simple hide-default-xna-window, draw-in-new-form-method, I think there is some overhead with this. If you can update Nuclex.UserControl to work with XNA 2.0, I would be so happy :D

Cheers mate,
Strings.

UPDATED WIKI: Home

Cygon — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:16:04 GMT

Project Description
This is a professional grade installer for your XNA-based games, written in WiX, Microsoft's Open Source toolkit for creating .msi packages. It gets around the problem of your users not having the neccessary components on their systems - once and for all.

It can automatically deploy the prerequisites of a game (including DirectX 9.0c October 2006, .NET 2.0 SP1 and XNA 1.0 Refresh) during install time, validate that the user is running at least Windows XP SP2 and even verify that shader-capable graphics hardware is in the system before your game gets installed.

The installer can also be configured to simply block the user from installing your game until the necessary components have been installed on the system. This is useful for authoring lightweight installers intended to ship without the 27 MB of redistributables required by an XNA game.

Requirements
WiX Toolkit

The installer template has been created using SharpDevelop 2.2 which already includes the WiX toolkit and is able to compile the template without any additional configuration work. You can compile the sources by hand, but SharpDevelop is recommended for its simplicity.

Includes binaries of the WiX custom action DLLs used by the template for installing DirectX 9.0c October 2006, the XNA Framework 1.0 Refresh and the .NET Framework 2.0 SP1.

Details
More information can be found on the project's homepage at
http://www.nuclex.org/installer

To obtain the sources of the custom action DLLs (Visual C++ Express 2008 required), point your subversion client to the following URL:
https://devel.nuclex.org/sideprojects/svn/installer/Installer.Build/trunk

UPDATED WIKI: Home

Cygon — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:07:19 GMT

RELEASED: 1.0.0-beta1 (Nov 25, 2007)

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:00:24 GMT

*Wix XNA Installer Template 1.0.0-beta1*

Includes a template SharpDevelop WiX project for XNA games that can be configured to a) prevent installation when neccessary libraries aren't installed or b) install any missing libraries.

* Uses LZMA compression to reduce the size of the redistributables
* Install prevention on systems with missing components works flawlessly
* Automatic install of missing components gets any fresh XP or Vista system into a state where it can run XNA games. Usage of Back/Next-Buttons for detection page will attempt to install all components a second time.
* Does not yet display any progress indication while installing the system components (.NET, DirectX, XNA). Especially .NET takes a long time and might lead the user to believe that the installer hangs.

This is beta software. Use at your own risk.

UPDATED RELEASE: 1.0.0-beta1 (Nov 25, 2007)

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 07:00:24 GMT

UPDATED WIKI: Home

Cygon — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 06:41:11 GMT

Project Description
This is a professional grade installer for your XNA-based games, written in WiX, Microsoft's Open Source toolkit for creating .msi packages. It gets around the problem of your users not having the neccessary components on their systems - once and for all.

It can automatically deploy the prerequisites of a game (including DirectX 9.0c October 2006, .NET 2.0 SP1 and XNA 1.0 Refresh) during install time, validate that the user is running at least Windows XP SP2 and even verify that shader-capable graphics hardware is in the system before your game gets installed.

The installer can also be configured to simply block the user from installing your game until the necessary components have been installed on the system. This is useful for authoring lightweight installers intended to ship without the 27 MB of redistributables required by an XNA game.

Requirements
SharpDevelop 2.2 or standalone WiX Toolkit

The installer template has been created using SharpDevelop 2.2. SharpDevelop already includes the WiX toolkit and is able to compile the template without any additional configuration work.

To compile the redistributable install custom actions, Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express is required.

UPDATED WIKI: Home

Cygon — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:49:42 GMT

Project Description
This is a professional grade installer for your XNA-based games, written in WiX, Microsoft's Open Source toolkit for creating .msi packages. It gets around the problem of your users not having the neccessary components on their systems - once and for all.

It can automatically deploy the prerequisites of a game (including DirectX 9.0c October 2006, .NET 2.0 SP1 and XNA 1.0 Refresh) during install time, validate that the user is running at least Windows XP SP2 and even verify that shader-capable graphics hardware is in the system before your game gets installed.

The installer can also be configured to simply block the user from installing your game until the necessary components have been installed on the system. This is useful for authoring lightweight installers intended to ship without the 27 MB of redistributables required by an XNA game.

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