Is "no installation" software a good thing?

Posted by Yaron Naveh on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Yaron Naveh
Published on 2011-06-20T20:48:41Z Indexed on 2011/06/21 0:29 UTC
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c#

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software

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Developer

I am building an application that will, hopefully, be used by developers.

To be appealing to developers I want it to be lightweight, small in size, and with no installation (e.g. xcopy). I trust more an application without installation to not put garbage in my registry, to be lightweight etc.

My friend thinks the opposite: An installer puts shortcuts on the desktop / menu for me, it ensures cleanup via the uninstaller, and seems more official.

I'm curious - what is everyone's take on this?

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