We have created a mobile application and have used Visual Studio 2005 to create a .CAB file to install the application onto a PDA.

The install works ok, but we would like to create an .MSI file which would do the following:

1. Check if the .Net Compact Framework is installed and, if not, install it on the PDA.

2. Check if SQL Mobile 2005 is installed and, if not, install it on the PDA.

3. Install our custom application on the PDA.

The CAB files for steps 1 and 2 vary depending on the version of Windows Mobile and the processor in use. The MSI file would have to determine which CABs to install.

We’ve seen the article at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446504.aspx but we can’t get the created MSI file from this article to work (and, in any case, it doesn’t cover all of the requirements above). We can’t find any other relevant articles on the Microsoft site.

We may have other future requirements, such as forms which the user fills in during the install (which will write to a configuration file on the PDA).

Can this be done using Visual Studio 2005 alone, or would another tool such as Installshield be able to do this?