Advanced Installer Professional 7.1

Advanced Installer Professional 7.1 is considered as a professional Windows Installer authoring tool useful for administrators and developers. It enables developers and system administrators to easily build reliable MSI packages.

Advanced Installer runs on Windows, and the install packages it creates run on all Microsoft Windows 9x/ME/NT/2k/XP operating systems. Windows Installer is a powerful, but very complex technology. Mastering it on your own takes months of hard work. That's where Advanced Installer comes to help.

It creates a high level abstraction on top of the underlying technology. With a clean, simple user interface, each operation is logical and intuitive. Everything is done in the user interface, without complicated scripts to learn or arcane database tables to edit.

Major Features:

1. Advanced Installer makes MSI creation a snap
2. Our software installer simplifies the process of building Windows Installer packages by providing a very easy to use, high level interface to the underlying technology. The program implements all the Windows Installer rules and follows all the advised best practices.
3. With this simple, intuitive interface, building a Windows Installer package will take just a few minutes. Start the program, add a few files, change the name, hit the Build button and you are done. No scripts to learn, no seminars to attend.
4. Read the Getting Started Tutorial to see how easy it really is.
5. Advanced Installer integrates in automated build tools
6. The Advanced Installer project files are stored in XML format. This way, they can be easily checked into a version control system. The software installer also operates at command line, so that you can build your release packages in a completely automated script, like Make, Ant or NAnt.
7. Further more, the most common operations are also implemented as command line actions, so you can modify your project in an automated fashion.
8. Install and register the resources composing your application
9. Using Advanced Installers intuitive interface you can easily add to your install package all the resources your software requires:
   • Files, Folders and Shortcuts (to installed files, existing files or URLs).
   • Registry keys and entries.
   • Environment Variables (which can be replace or be appended to existing variable like PATH).
   • INI file entries.
   • ODBC drivers, data sources and translators.
   • If you have merge modules for your components, they can be also added to the installation. Next you can register these resources as necessary:
   • Net and Win32 assemblies
   • Services
   • File Associations, MIME types
   • Permissions for files, folders, registry keys and entries.
10. If a previous version of your product is found already installed on the target computer, Advanced Installer can upgrade it and ensure that older version will not be installed over newer ones.
    • Search, download and install Prerequisites
    • If your application needs some other software to be installed in order to run, you can easily specify them as Prerequisites. Advanced Installer will search for them, then download and install as necessary. This is an easy way to install frameworks like JRE or .NET, browsers or database engines.
    • Searching for applications, files, folders, registry keys and INI entries is also provided. Using this, installing additional files, extensions and plugins to existing applications becomes trivial.
    • Organize your application in modules and components
    • Advanced Installer will organize your application in Features and Components as per Windows Installer guidelines. This way you can take advantage of advanced software installer features like partial install and repair without having to do anything. Further customizing the organization is easy and intuitive.
    • Secure and choose your packages presentations
    • Advanced Installer can leave your softwares files unpacked, compress them into CAB files (split in multiple volumes as needed), insert them into the MSI file and add a EXE bootstrapper for backwards compatibility.
    • Digitally signing the generated files will ensure that your customers will never have to question the provenience of your software, and the user registration with serial code validation hooks will ensure that only legitimate users get to install your software.
    • Extend the installation process with Custom Actions
    • Packed as native EXEs, DLLs or script files and written in C, C++, VBS or JS, Custom Actions give you the full power to add anything you want, anywhere you want to your software installer.
    • Customize the installation User Interface
    • From silent (unattended) installation, to adding dialogs and changing the graphics, customizing the UI is trivial.
      

Enhancements

• Single Package Authoring for WI 5.0
• Enhanced Service Configuration for WI 5.0
• Ability to generate Unicode MSI Databases
• File associations in Windows Mobile projects
• New configuration content report for Windows Mobile projects
• Display progress information on Windows 7 Taskbar for: Auto Updater, Repackager, package build, Enhanced UI installation and EXE bootstrapper installation
• Added Checklist control in Enhanced UI
• Added Hyperlink control in Enhanced UI and Windows Installer 5.0 UI
• Multiple selection ListBox and ListView controls in Enhanced UI
• ASP.NET registration for an IIS web application
• Logging support for chained packages
• Extended search support with 10 additional methods
• Predefined searches for RegAsm, Regsvr32, Aspnet_regiis and Microsoft Office installation path
• Microsoft Silverlight predefined prerequisite
• DirectX 11 predefined launch condition
• Windows 7 predefined launch condition
• Refreshed Advanced Installer icon set