Software Engineering30 Mar 2008 01:46 pm
I played with Macrovision’s InstallShield for the first time last week in my new job. Pretty impressive UI compared to InstallBuilder which I’d used previosuly. Obviously the problem is made a lot simpler by the fact that InstallShield doesn’t really work cross platform (and from my experience, Macrovision’s InstallAnywhere’s UI crashed so much it was more of a liability).
In a way though, the name find and replace change I was making would have been a bunch simpler in InstallBuilder, where the installer is pretty much configured with a big XML file (once you very quickly hit the limits of the token UI editor provided).
I guess I should try opening the InstallShield file in a text editor to see what under the hood there…
May 6th, 2008 at 2:27 am
Make sure you go to Tools->Options->[Source Control] and save your .ism in XML format instead of binary format. Couple (rather large) single source files and a little xslt magic and you can do just about anything using text swizzling. If you want to go a little further, the COM interfaces could let you write a python script that would build your InstallShield source project for you.