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Years ago I created a windows form project which eventually moved to Visual Studio 2013. Back then VS2013 had a free version of Installshield that one could use to ease deployment.
Recently I updated the project to use a newer .net version so that someone installing it didn't have to find the older version of .net.
I realized that since I had reinstalled VS2013 on a newly imaged computer that now I am unable to add installshield. Or best I can comprehend from the documentation I would minimally need to pay $800 for the lowest version of installshield to use.
Is there another tool available or suggested for people who are not selling software commercially and to whom it is impractical to manually install a program to the half dozen people who might be using it? I talking about simple installs that work in the same way as the original installshield kit.
I know that there is a "demo" license you can get for a month but I really don't feel like worrying whether the created kit will also stop working in 30 days.
Thanks for any suggestions you might provide,
Mike
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Answer accepted by question author
You can obtain the VS2013 Installer Projects extension here -
Thank you. Guess I need to permanently bookmark this page as I found I gave it a positive review in 2017 (when life was easier :) ).
Worked fine though it would seem that my IT team has successfully blocked a site because when I attempt to perform a build it hangs on a "Preparing to Install" pop-up after two "configuring VS pop-ups". The last panel will stay up for about 30 minutes before it drops to an unable to contact server message.
Not quite up to troubleshooting this as I placed the project onto a computer not managed by IT and it worked fine. I don't think security will be happy until they have caused us to revert to typewriters and couriers. And then they'll opine for the days of quills and ink wells. :)
Thanks again and sorry for the slow response,
Mike
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If you can consider moving to a newer version of Visual Studio, there's the rejuvenated Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects extension available.
There are other tools also such as NSIS.
I appreciate this suggestion. VS2013 was an upgrade as the project was written in VS2008. Basically the only need in this was to upgrade to a version of .Net which is easily available as 4.5 seems to take more effort than necessary to find.
Don't do the amount of programming that I used to do when I wrote this tool and life has things much more tight than the days when I purchased VS2013 Pro myself to accomplish this. Don't have the same burnable income for projects that only benefit myself.
Thanks again and sorry for the slow response,
Mike
I would like to point out that VS2013 was the new thing when I upgraded this project to it.