>My client wants a slightly fancier installation of his application than one can get with VFP setup. For example, shortcut on desktop and more colorful. I have read the info on the net about PC-Install, Wise Installation, and InstallShield Express. They all seem to have the same features. Does anyone have enough experience to give me pros or cons about any of those products? Thanks

I use InstallShield Pro, and recommend that if you need a full-blown professional installer, and have the time to invest in learning it. InstallShield Express offers about 80% of the functionality (no detailed programming language for hand-scripting, but wonderful, wizard-driven functionality and control, and about 1/4 the cost.) I know other people who're doing very professional jobs of installing using Wise, which offers a wide range of product themselves. I don't know PC-Install.

The Visual Sudio Installer, a transactional installer built on the same engine used by Office 2K and Win2K, is available for download by VFP6 owners. It offers more general flexibility than Setup Wizard, but as a transactional installer, does not offer the option of direct control of a post-setup executable. You can wrap VSI with batch files/scripting to extend it, but it will not be able to fully uninstall anything done outside the VSI environment.

You can add a post-setup executable to a Setup Wizard install, and use that to do things like create alternative shortcuts and perform other tasks not integrated directly in Setup Wizard. Creating shortcuts from VFP can be done in several ways; George Tasker's LNKFILES.DLL offers access to the IShellLink API from within VFP (download from the Files section) and you can also use the Wscript.Shell object of the WSH if WSH is installed to create and modify shortcuts.

If The WSH is installed, you have a full-blown scripting language available to you, which can be programmed use JScript or VBScript, leverage COM objects and perform a very wide range of installation tasks. It can even fire a Setup Wizard install without user intervention (you can use the Setup Wizard to drop in the VFP runtime and HTML Help components silently from the script.) WSH is already installed on Win98 and Win2K systems, as well as most systems that have IE4 or later on them. There is a self-extracting, freely redistributable executable available from Microsoft's scripting site (see my sig block for a link); once WSH is installed, you can then run scripts to do the remainder of the install.

I install WSH on all my target systems; I can use the COM objects that accompany it directly in VFP apps, and I make extensive use of scripting to control configuration and maintenance of the app after initial installation. It provides a batch language alternative which can draw on the extended Windows COM functionalities like ADSI, and is a core part of the Microsoft strategy for the extended Windows platform environment. The have been several articles on WSH in the VFP context in the various VFP magazines, and there is a newsletter devoted to the Win32 scripting environment in detail, Win32 Scripting Journal, which I recommend subscribing to for a current anddefinitive reference on developments in the scripting environments (again, link in my sig block.)