The Woes of Developing With InstallShield

For a year now, I have been in charge of building the installation software for our applications. I use InstallShield to create the setup. The first thing I had to do was convert the project from InstallShield 6 to InstallShield Premier 2009. It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many gothcas about how things work.

For those of you that may not know what InstallShield is, it is basically the software behind making it simple to load software onto a computer. For example, if you wanted to load Microsoft Word to your computer, you would put the disc in and run the wizard-like setup process to install it. That wizard-like setup process is what InstallShield allows you to develop. I just wish some things where better documented and sometimes worked a little differently.

I've had to learn some tricks and unknown facts through lots of trial and error, so I'd like to share some of those tricks that have worked for me. There are several, so I'll break them up into other posts.