Creating an installer with WPF forms, packaged files and custom setup actions

Posted by RodH257 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by RodH257
Published on 2010-04-27T01:37:01Z Indexed on 2010/04/27 1:53 UTC
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installer

I'm trying to create a way of deploying a set of tools (which are add-ins to 3rd party software) to my users.

I would like to do the following:

User Enters Serial
Dlls in their directory structure is extracted to program files
a file is copied to a location in ProgramData (this registers my add-ins to the 3rd party application)
Online activation for software is performed

Can anyone point me into the right direction for this? I had a look at deployment projects in Visual Studio but I'm not sure if they are what I'm after. Main problem is they are ugly, I would like to have a nice WPF installer, and have a more custom experience. But I guess that can be traded off if its going to make things easier.

I was thinking, I could just make my own C# project that extracts the files, but I have no idea how to package them up and extract them all as part of one download (like the MSI files that the deployment projects create). Can anyone point me in the right direction?

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