My environment is constantly changing. Users are always demanding more enhancements and what have you. Consequently, I recompile my applications and re-run setup fairly often. Because my applications are multi-user, I generally set them up on the user's hard drive. If the application needs to be upgraded, I have to go to each users workstaion and re-run setup.

Recently I have started playing with the setup wizard. I create a netsetup folder in a shared directory where the application data resides. My application checks the setup.inf files before READ EVENTS is issued. If the files are different, I call the setup.exe with a run command, and exit out of my application. This works OK with a few hitches...

Sometimes when I run the setup wizard from Visual Foxpro, the .inf files are always different, even if the user re-runs setup. Therefore, the user will be forced to re-run setup everytime the application is started. I would also like to run the setup.exe in administration mode--in other words, simply run the setup program without any user intervention.

My two questions are this:

1. How does setup.exe determine that a new application is being installed (not the same application being re-installed)?

2. What needs to be modified to force setup.exe to do an unattended installation?

Another appoach would be to compare application.exe version info and have VFP handle things, but the setup wizard neatly compacts all the components of my application into a professional interface. Beyond that, I really want to know.