5 reasons why InstallShield Limited Edition sucks

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I write here about my personal experience with InstallShield LE which is now integrated in Visual Studio 2010. I was very happy reading about the integration in VS so it was one of the first things I tried out when I received my copy of VS2010. Until today I made several tries to use IS LE but failed. There was an updated release some time ago which updated IS LE 2010 to IS LE 2011. I don’t know if it changed anything but the name, but the new update made things worse. Here are my personal top 5 reasons why InstallShield Limited Edition sucks.

  1. InstallShield Limited Edition causes Visual Studio 2010 to crash. I tried C# projects, I tried C++ projects, I tried empty projects, I tried new projects…. I tried everything you could imagine. For some reason VS2010 keeps crashing when working with an IS LE project added. Some times it crashes randomly some times it crashes on startup when trying to load a project. I disabled all my add-ins (I only use the AnkhSVN add-inn) I also tried a fresh installation on a fresh installed machine. No luck. I contacted the support and after 2 weeks and about 3 daily emails I was so disappointed that I stopped doing all the things the support told me to do. Don’t get me wrong. The support was great. The guy tried and did his best to help me but the problem was not solved. If you take a look into their support forums you will notice that I’m not the only one who faces the crash problem. Others have the same problem and still (about half a year after the release of Visual Studio and IS LE) no solution for this.
  2. The IS LE is how the name sais limited. In fact it’s so limited that it doesn’t even contain any features. What it does is simply creating an installation file. They could also rename it to IS CSEFE which stands for IS create self extracting file edition. They left all the features of the pro. version in their but simply disabled them. Only the most basic features like choose an installation directory are available. Oh man WinZip has more options than this.
  3. The redistributables feature is a joke. Although there are many redist packages you can choose, you cannot add your own or additional. Simply stupid if you try to create a DirectX project you are fucked up. The help file sais that the Limited Edition contains the most important redist packages (DirectX seems not to be so important to Flexera Software).
  4. Their support forums for LE is full of bugs reports. Usually a forum contains topics and posts about feature requests, usage questions, newbie questions, some bug reporting, some announcements etc. The LE forum contains about 70% bug reports. That’s way to much and also shows that I’m not the only one who feels pissed about Microsoft's decision to integrate this piece of software into such a great development environment.
  5. The last reason why this product sucks is because there are so many alternatives which are not only way better but have one thing in common. They work!!! Try out Inno Setup which is one of the best installation scripts ever. Try out NSIS which is also a great installer. You know what the best is? They are free. LE is also free since it shipped with VS2010 you will argue know. Yes but both, Inno Setup and NSIS contain features which are only available in the InstallShield Professional or Premium Editions.

Of course some of you may be very impressed by the LE, some others use the pro version and might be very happy with this solution. I’m not! I thought if an installer solution is integrated within VS 2010 it should be at least be worth its money and maybe meet my needs be simply creating one damn installation package. As I said above I tried clean installations on clean machines with and without add-ins, tweaked options, tried several projects (tried C# and C++) on different machines but I got irregular crashes which make this product simply useless. And a quick look into the official forums shows that I’m not the only one. I would like Microsoft to replace IS LE with a more serious installer but this is something which won’t happen. Thanks to IS LE I now use Inno Setup and I’m very very happy with this installer. It’s capable of features only the IS Pro Edition is capable of. And it’s free. There are so many alternatives which are also free. So why to try to work with a product which tries with every step to sell you his big brother.

By Dimi on February 1, 2011 at 7:13 PM
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Comments (4) -

Eddie T
Eddie T
11/7/2011 1:00:54 AM #

I had similar experience with Installshield LE  when I first installed VS2010 about a year ago. I added an IS deployment project to my solution, it hung VS, and rendered my solution corrupt and unuseable.

So I uninstalled IS LE and moved on. Only recently I decided to give it another go and it all worked much better. Actually, it did everything I needed except ... create a 64-bit installer! Useless.

How can MS say this is a deployment solution when it doesn't even cover the basic output of the development system. 64-bit compilation isn't a special feature, it's standard for the development environment, so including a deployment tool that cannot support it is braindead.

IS LE in my opinion, is little more than an advertisement for the Pro edition. I'll try your suggested alternatives. Thanks!

Dimi
Dimi
11/8/2011 1:43:42 AM #

Nice to see I'm not the only one who faced problems. I'm working now with Inno Setup. The only problem I faced until now was the first installation script I needed to create for a DirectX app. There are so many great tutorials out there that you will find easily help and will learn to love Inno Setup. There is also a GUI for Inno Setup which helps creating installers quite quick.

Michael
Michael
2/2/2012 4:44:33 AM #

Hello Dimi,

I only have a little exposure to ISLE in particular through VS2010, not sure if it was ever integrated with VS2008, or if it was an added feature later on. Don't know the history.

Would you say that the built-in Setup project is perfectly sufficient for most setup tasks? And/or a usages of the publish feature?

I find that I am also facing what seems to be a cultural battle over using ISLE from previous versions. My thing is simply this: if it fails to incorporate into the Solution file, then I lose a data point when the build process fails. And that's not a subjective opinion; that is an objective fact.

Setup is just as much part of the overall build process as any other part IMO. I'm also a believer in Continuous Integration (CI), which helps to drive the process.

Best regards,

Michael

Dimi
Dimi
2/23/2012 1:15:54 PM #

Hi Michael,
to answer your question: I don't find it sufficient in any way for most setup tasks. While it may be sufficient for many others, I think that every setup for every application is kind of different. When I compare how much time I need to build a setup with ISLE compared to other installer scripts and compare the result ISLE is just a joke. It works perfectly if you simply want to create a setup for an application which simply needs a destination directory, a startmenu entry, a desktop shortcut and maybe depends on some libraries which are most common. It's a shame that the DirectX libs are NOT available in ISLE. Of course there are workarounds for this but every single free install script like the ones mentioned above allow you to easily integrate DX redist installation while ISLE does not. This is just a simple example but you could expand the list with other libs too.

I love the idea of having every developer tools in my VS installation. I was the biggest fan when I first read about the fact the IS will be integrated into VS2010 and was disappointed due to the lack of features in the LE.

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