3 ms·

I haven't done a lot of 'Windows exclusive' development for a while, but something like 6-8 years ago, I was making an installer for a small company that up to

I haven't done a lot of 'Windows exclusive' development for a while, but something like 6-8 years ago, I was making an installer for a small company that up to that moment, they had to send someone over to spend a whole day installing the software on client's machines. I was strongly suggested to use WiX. I spent 2 months trying to get something to work, but I wasn't able to get nothing truly useful to run. I remember explicitly that something as simple as writing to the registry was proving problematic. To make it worse, documentation was poor, and there wasn't much of a community around it cause it was brand spanking new. Two months in, without telling anyone, I decided to ditch it and use NSIS. That day I had something that actually worked! Within 2 weeks I had something that was running end to end, installing the software on the machine. The next month was polishing, and testing/fixing for different versions of Windows. I have no idea how things may have changed now, but if I tasked with making a Windows installer today, I wouldn't even think twice about using anything other than NSIS.

ygra 10y ago
Can NSIS by now roll-back partially failed installations? That's to me the biggest gripe I have as a user of such installers – whenever something weird goes wrong you end up with a half-installed application of which you don't know how to get rid of the pieces.
- chamakits 10y ago
  Good question. It's honestly been too many years for me to remember. But, with a bit of a biased view on it because of having such a good experience with it so long ago, I imagine it either does, or provides the mechanism for the developer to implement it.
- flukus 10y ago
  You delete the directory to get rid of the pieces.
  - ygra 10y ago
    Assuming it hasn't done a bunch of other stuff yet. While Microsoft recommends that the install directory is the application bundle and programs should confine themselves to it, that's hardly what many applications are doing.
flukus 10y ago
It depends on who and how you want to deploy it, but chocalatey may be a good option. You distribute apps as nuget packages (which are just zip files). For the server side there's octopus, which I've been very impressed by, also done via nuget packages.

ygra 10y ago

Can NSIS by now roll-back partially failed installations? That's to me the biggest gripe I have as a user of such installers – whenever something weird goes wrong you end up with a half-installed application of which you don't know how to get rid of the pieces.

chamakits 10y ago
Good question. It's honestly been too many years for me to remember. But, with a bit of a biased view on it because of having such a good experience with it so long ago, I imagine it either does, or provides the mechanism for the developer to implement it.
flukus 10y ago
You delete the directory to get rid of the pieces.
- ygra 10y ago
  Assuming it hasn't done a bunch of other stuff yet. While Microsoft recommends that the install directory is the application bundle and programs should confine themselves to it, that's hardly what many applications are doing.

flukus 10y ago

It depends on who and how you want to deploy it, but chocalatey may be a good option. You distribute apps as nuget packages (which are just zip files). For the server side there's octopus, which I've been very impressed by, also done via nuget packages.