War Setup 3.13

War Setup 3.13 is designed as a powerful tool for the lazy Open Source developer. With built in support for Visual Studio C++ integration and the ability to add directories recursively, its very easy to add software libraries and generated documentation to the install package.

War Setup is also well suited to handle most install requirements for commercial software. At least for companies who want their install packages to be predictable, robust, easy to make and mantain, inituitive for the end-user, and comfort  with the Microsoft Installer guidelines.

In addition, War Setups target audience are lazy developers with better things to do than reading "The definitive guide to Windows Installer" (yea - Ive read it). So you don't really need to know a lot about Windows Installer or Wix in order to use War Setup. If you do - you can utilize your knowledge, but if you don't - it will still do the job

Major Features:

1. You can add files to install, and specify the target directory and name
2. You can add directories, and add files automatically when you build the package, based on regular expressions. If you have lot's of html-files in the product documentation, you can add the directory for these files and specify the pattern ".*.html" to just add them all. In other words, there is no need to specify all the individual files.
3. Integration with the Program Files menu, Desktop and Quick Launch bar.
4. You can add shortcuts to any files that will be installed on the target system, also files that are scanned from directories (like the index.html file in your documentation)
5. Integration with Visual Studio 2003 and 2005. If you are releasing C or C++ libraries, WarSetup can add the paths for the library and header files to Visual Studio.
6. Integration with Wix. You can use WarSetup to build the framework for your installation, and then include your own Wix fragment files. That makes it possible to do almost anything that an install package can do.
7. Supports all the standard WixUI modes.
8. Full support for Feature trees and graphical custimization of your install package.
9. You may build or include standard Merge Modules to your package. War Setup will detect optional parameters for the Merge-modules you include, and you can set the values for each of them. That means that modules that require a password, like Crystal Reports, can be installed.
10. You may associate file-extensions (file types) to your programs.
11. Can install Windows Services.
12. Relative paths. WarSetup allows you to use relative paths. That means that the project will work even if you re-locate the project on your disk. (The project-file is an XML file, so you can edit it in any XML editor, including Visual Studio, if you want to do a little search and replace to reorganize the file-layout by hand).
13. Uninstall, Repair and Change of installed Features are of course available from the "Add and Remove Programs" applet in the Control Panel once your package is installed.
14. No built-in limits or nags! This is not a teaser (crippleware) for a commercial installer - but a full-blown free installer.
15.  Registry editor:  Com registration is handled by the Installer. Componets registration is handled by the installer. File type association is handled by the installer. So there is no registry-editor. If you really really need this, you can send me an email asking for it, or you can use the Wix fragments feature to add the keys you need by hand.

Contributions:

1. Spread the word. Free software is not advertised on TV. An applications success depends on it's users spreading the word. If you like the program, tell people about it. Write a blog-entry about it. Link to it. Suggest it whenever someone needs an application like this.
2. Report problems and Suggest features. This is the most valuable contribution anyone can provide. Good products are not created by brilliant developers - by rather by ordinary people who gets over their frustration with the product and suggest improvements, rather than just throwing it away.
3. Write, improve or translate the documentation. English is not my native language, so the documentation I write is far from perfect. As a user of the product, you also have a totally different view of it than I do. You can use that advantage to improve the product documentation radically.
4. Add new features. If you are a C# developer, you may hack the code and add new features. If the code-quality is decent, and the feature is useful
5. Fix bugs. There will always be bugs in software. If you find one, and give me the receipt to kill it, you provide a very important contribution.
6. Find bugs. If you find a bug, but cannot fix it, you contribute to the project by providing with an exact receipt on how to reproduce the problem.

Requirements:

1.  .NET framework 2.0 to run WarSetup. 
2. Wix 3 installed on your computer.