Advanced Installer is a Windows Installer authoring tool. It offers a friendly and easy to use Graphical User Interface for creating and maintaining installation packages (EXE, MSI, etc.) based on the Windows Installer technology.

Advanced Installer simplifies the process of building Windows Installer packages by providing a very easy to use, high level interface to the underlying technology. The program implements all the Windows Installer rules and follows all the advised best practices.

Here are some key features of "Advanced Installer":

MSI:

· Create valid MSI setups for your applications respecting all written and unwritten Windows Installer rules

UAC:

· Build installers that run flawlessly on Windows 7/Vista supporting their security model

Upgrades:

· Detect and upgrade older version of your product installed on the user's machine. Prevent installs over newer ones

Side-by-Side:

· Create packages for different versions of your application that can be installed simultaneously and run side by side

Imports:

· Import from Visual Studio, InstallShield LE, WiX, Eclipse, Inno Setup, NSIS and regular MSI/MSM packages

Fonts:

· Register fonts in the Windows OS. Specify registration names for non-TrueType fonts

Environment Variables:

· Create, append or prepend user or system environment variables

Autoregister:

· Auto registration, for files that support it, can be scheduled at install time

Files and Folders:

· Install and uninstall files and folders. Set attributes, create shortcuts

Registry:

· Install and uninstall registry keys and entries

64-bit:

· Build setups that run and install on 32-bit processors or on the latest 64-bit Intel and AMD CPUs

Template projects:

· Create templates based on your current project and ready-to-use for your future projects

Add/Remove:

· Customize your application's listing in the "Add/Remove Programs" page of Control Panel

XML projects:

· They can be easily checked into a version control system and shared between multiple developers

Command Line:

· Build your release packages in completely automated scripts, like Make, Ant or NAnt

Run&Log:

· Launch your MSI package while pretty printing the full Windows Installer log

Launch Conditions:

· Visually specify conditions necessary (applications, frameworks, etc.) for your package to run

Smart Formatted Editing:

· Editing (MSI)Formatted fields offers reference auto-completion, syntax and error highlights and resolved value hints

Per-User/Per-machine:

· Create installers that can be install as required: per-user or per-machine if the user is Administrator

Include Merge Modules:

· Include frameworks, libraries and other prepackaged dependencies into your installers with just a few mouse clicks

Requirements:

· Pentium 4 class CPU
· 512 MB RAM
· 1024x768 screen resolution
· 256 MB hard drive space
· Windows Installer 2.0

Change Log:

New features in this release:

· Pre-flight checks for project source files
· Single-dialog installers
· Custom check box control in enhanced user interface
· Predefined properties for localized user accounts and groups
· Determine free disk space predefined custom action
· Redesigned Updater view
· Enhancements to existing features
· Automatic update selection based on target platform (32/64-bit)
· Added project navigation menu in ribbon
· Simplified user interface for selecting digital signing certificates from store
· Support different targets for prerequisite maintenance and uninstall
· Unified the extraction and download folders for all prerequisites
· Added an option for keeping extracted files for feature-based prerequisites
· Added default command line for the updater
· Support different application names for updater auto-restart
· Improved file detection for Visual Basic 6 application import
· Formatted values support for folder sharing
· Added support for configuring LZMA compression method
· Display feature content in project summary

Bug fixes:

· Crash when creating a Mixed 32/64-bit project
· Crash when deleting a non-empty folder in a VSIX project
· Crash when unregistering a file
· Crash after using drag and drop for a custom action
· Crash when saving a project generated by Inno setup import
· Crash when deleting some control groups in specific dialog configurations
· Temporary files were not removed for the Unicode updater
· Unicode updater did not remember user names and passwords
· Incorrect updater return code when the check frequency was not elapsed
· License check parameters were encoded in Unicode for the Unicode updater
· Invalid command line error when installing feature-based prerequisites that triggered a reboot
· Installation started again after rebooting the machine
· Prerequisites which required a reboot did not trigger it if their condition was not met after install
· Custom download names were not supported by feature-based prerequisites
· XML searches were performed for both InstallUISequence and InstallExecuteSequence
· Multiple XML updates on the same file created a backup even if backups were disabled
· XML update was not applied when the attribute execute options were not set
· IIS browsing did not capture secure bindings
· INI entry actions were not saved for new entries
· Reboot was not suppressed for administrative installations
· EXE LZMA temporary files were not removed from the output folder
· Current feature shown in ribbon was not updated when opening a different project
· Invalid output path was used when importing a Visual Studio setup project with the output path on a network drive
· Incorrect source paths were used when importing a Visual Studio setup project
· Embedded JAR files were not handled correctly by multilingual packages
· Custom button in Spring theme did not work in Professional projects
· MSI import did not ignore control events that referenced nonexistent controls
· Log on as a service action was not removed when deleting all services that used it
· Files picker did not have a filter for all features
· Separator was not mandatory when appending or prepending an environment variable
· Visual Studio did not display any notifications when a project was modified from outside

Developer:

Caphyon Ltd - 42.3MB (Freeware)