We have heard many customers express the desire that we bring back support for Visual Studio Installer projects. In fact this was one of the topmost voted on suggestions on User Voice for Visual Studio and with this extension release we hope to address your feedback both here on the blog and on UserVoice.
We’re happy today to announce the preview availability of the Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension. This preview release provides support for Visual Studio Installer projects in Visual Studio 2013. You can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery.
To use this extension you can either open the Extensions and Updates dialog, select the online node and search for “Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension” or you can click here to go directly to the Visual Studio Gallery page that hosts the control.
Once you have finished installing the extension and restarted Visual Studio you will be able to open existing Visual Studio Installer Projects or create new ones.
Our intention with this extension is to give those of you with Visual Studio Installer projects the same functionality that you currently have in Visual Studio 2010. This extension enables those customer who aren’t using Visual Studio Installer projects to have ISLE as their preferred installer project solution and those who are to have support for both ISLE and their existing Visual Studio Installer projects. While the extension is not localized it is fully supported on both localized and English versions of Visual Studio.
For those of you looking for an improved deployment experience in Visual Studio we are continuing our partnership with Flexera to provide InstallShield Limited Edition (ISLE) as our in-box solution. ISLE is a great solution for those customers looking for added capabilities not found in Visual Studio Installer Projects, such as TFS and MSBuild integration, support for creating new web sites and ISO 19770-2 Tagging support, etc.
This release is a Preview version and we’d like to hear from you about any issues you have in using this with your existing Visual Studio Installer projects. We expect to release the final RTM version of this after we have addressed your feedback. So please try it out and give us general feedback via UserVoice and bugs via the Q&A section on the Visual Studio Gallery.
 | Author : Tony Goodhew,Program Manager, Visual Studio Platform Team After the better part of 19 years spent in Visual Studio (and precursor tools) Marketing, Tony decided that he should either make a career of it or try something new. He joined the IDE Services team as a Program Manager in early 2012 and has been working on Visual Studio extensibility and the Visual Studio Industry Partner Program since then. While not known for enjoying pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, his version of paradise would include a cheeseburger. |