Evaluating install tools, and have question

[jdege]

Hi.

I'm tasked with searching out various tools for building Windows installers, and making some recommendations to TPTB at my company.

I've been looking at Setup Factory and MSI Factory, and from what I've seen so far they look promising. Of course, at this point I've just browsed over the docs and watched a few of the training videos. But before I spend any more time on either, there's one sine qua non.

Our production builds are generated on a dedicated build machine, without human interaction. We feel this is necessary to ensure that the builds are consistent and repeatable. Our setup packages will be built in this way. We don't do anything fancy, basically we run a script that checks out a project into an empty directory, then runs a build batch file that's in that directory. The build batch file then runs msbuild, ant, VB, or whatever other tool is appropriate for the particular project.

So for this to work, we'd need to be able to run Setup Factory from a batch file, and to pass certain settings into it on the command line.

Most particularly, we generate the version numbers for our apps dynamically, setting the revision value based on the current SVN revision number. At a minimum, we would need to be able to run Setup Factory from a batch file, passing the revision number on the command line.

Do Setup Factory or MSI Factory have this capability?

[Ulrich]

Both products have this capability.

In MSI Factory, you would use the /VARS: command line argument.
In Setup Factory, the command line argument is /CONST:.

Both products expect an INI file containing the values of the build constants which should be provided. More information in the documentation of each product, linked above.

Ulrich

[jdege]

We are currently using a tool that writes the appropriate version into AssemblyInfo.cs, during build. So we should be able to use the same tool to write it into the INI file that we pass to MSI Factory or Setup Factory.

Thanks.