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by Peter G Provost.
Original Post: Nullsoft Scriptable Install System
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A few days ago, I stumbled across NSIS, which is a tool that allows you to create
installers for Microsoft Windows. It's released under an open source license and is
completely free to use.
I really havent had that much time to work with it, but so far, I like what I see.
If you do download this and check it out, make sure and get one of the editors for
it. It definately makes things easier when you're getting started.
I'm noticing that the install and uninstall runs so much faster than the Installshield
or VS.NET msi files that I have been using.
If you've used NSIS, Id love to hear what you think about it.
I mentioned NSIS a few days/weeks ago in one of my Geek Notes columns. Because my
customer was very size sensitive, the project that we shipped last week used NSIS
for its installer. The VS.NET/MSI installer we created was almost 4MB while the NSIS
installer was less than 520K. And like Matt, I find the NSIS installers are much faster.
The downside is that these installers are not MSI based. In fact, the reason the VS.NET
installers are so big is that they bundle two copies of the Windows Installer 2.0
(ANSI and Unicode) within the installer. If you switch the deployment project properties
from "Windows Installer" bootstrapper to "No bootstrapper", you can alleviate this,
but you also can only run the installer on machines that are already running Windows
Installer 2.0.
Also, if you are considering using NSIS for a project I would really suggest you look
into HM NSIS Edit, a full-featured IDE
for NSIS scripts. We used the Wizard to build the skeleton of our installer and it
worked great. I added about 20 lines of script for registering DLLs and such and that
was it.
Now I just need to get Jamie Cansdale to write NSIS Addin for VS.NET so I can stay
in my IDE. :)
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