>Hi Ed,
>
>Sorry about the delay in responding to you. I have been out all day and there is some time difference between the States and Australia.
>
>>>>>If free is an issue, then download VSI, and plan to spend some time getting up to speed with it. www.installsite.com is a good resource for working with VSI as well as the various versions of InstallShield out in the world.
>
>Free is not an issue to me. I just feel let down. Installshield appears to be a great product – full version. In the cut down version provided with VFP7, it is completely useless after the initial install. You cannot get the upgrades to seamlessly take. Now I ask, has anybody every released software that didn’t have a bug and need subsequent upgrade?
>

< SET RANT ON >

No. OTOH, have you ever heard that you get what you pay for? < g >

>All I am saying is that ISE/VFP7 is a lame duck and I believe that this forum is going to be filled with these types of comments over the coming months as other VFP developers start to look at distribution options. In all the earlier versions of VFP, it was conveniently supplied by the ‘setup’ option.
>

You'd rather have the 16-bit Setup Lizard? RUN AWAY!!!!

ISLE, in all it's lameness, is a nearly infinite improvement on the lizard. So is VSI, it just isn't automagical - it expects the developer to know something about his application dependencies and the install environment, IMO not an unreasonable thing given the flexibility of the tool and the price from MS. ISE, the low-end Wise product, and similar Windows technology installers that have some wizard behaviors are not asking too much (again, IMO) for the ~US$300-400 that they charge for the reduced workload and additional flexibility that they require. I've spent a lot of time on things to control versioning and data format conversion - even though some of the work is doable using GENDBC and manually hacking up code, I'd much rather pay Doug Hennig the $300 for an SDT developer license and incorporate that into my apps to reduce my workload, rather than b!tch and moan that MS should provide us with a better tool and wh!ne that US$300/developer will break the bank making the upgrade from VFP6 to VFP7 a 'bad investment now'...

C/C++ developers have had an ISLE version for handling their installs with MSVC++ for a long time - and nearly everyone that uses the tool for real business purposes has invested in a better tool because ISLE was too lame. And we'd have given our left testicle for the functionality of ISLE a couple of years ago.

Too many VFP developers remain dain-bread to the issues of the working environment - they don't believe that a basic understanding of the operating environment and the application requirements is a part of the responsibility of the developer. Maybe not the coder, but certainly anyone who thinks of themselves as more than a codemonkey should understand the platforms they are going to support and the requirements of the components they use to create a solution - it's called a solution rather than a program because it encompasses much more than just the VFP code. Again, IMO - YMMV.

>I know that a better option than ‘setup’ was needed. Why didn’t MS just come out and admit they didn’t have it? Perhaps, I am hoping too much for an ideal world!
>

They did, they just didn't want to add US$200 to the price of VFP7 to license ISE rather than ISLE, doing all of us who already have preferences other than ISE a tremendous favor. Think of ISLE if you must like the 1000 hours of AOHell added to each PC you buy, and you'll get the idea - it's a viable idiot tool that gives you plenty of time to pick another better toy instead of adding $20 x 12 months to give you a year of AOHell 'free' with your PC.

BTW, I don't know anything about the internal decision process at M$ regarding the selection of ISLE as the install platform for VFP7. They might well have gotten less flack giving us VSI (which you can still download for free) and perhaps have paid someone to write an idiot frontend on it, providing the equivalent lameness of ISLE, and said 'Get thee hence and use ORCA if thou needest more freaking functionality you lazy bastu... < erm > less experienced system developer outside the corporate environment with insufficient funds for a better tool...' < g >

Again, IMO. YMMV.

>Anyway, like Jeff Burke I have now found Inno Setup (www.jrsoftware.org/isinfo.php) to be absolutely perfect for my purposes. It takes a few minutes to learn and runs about three times faster than ISE. And it seamlessly upgrades the earlier versions of my software.
>

Great. Problem solved.

>Hopefully, sometime in the future MS will provide a full list of all files (not .msm files) needs for distribution.
>

Generate the dependency files. They will show you the full set of files necessary to install the app - just realize that many of the files are OS version sensitive and might have versioning difference you don't know about. MS does provide a comprehensive source of information on all their DLL files through http://msdn.microsoft.com on-line.

Giving you the MSMs is doing you a favor - the MSM contains a degree of intelliugence about the contained files that are a part of the package regarding registration, file location and dependency resoultion. We (the VFP community) have been shooting outrselves in the foot for years because we wanted to believe that an adequate install should be nothing more than copying a few files and building a shortcut, resulting in a lot of bad installations that have really bitten people in the rear moving between platforms or versions of the host environment. In part, this is the fault of the dain-bread attitude of offering us Setup Lizard and saying 'see boyz and gurlz, point at some Lizard screens and click the thingees and we'll build you a bloated inadequate install without you knowing anything better' for a long time. But hell, at least it worked for a while, and if you needed more support than that, either you were smart enough to hack the lizard or to buy something with more zip.

(I know, I know...IMO. YMMV.)

< SET TOUNGUE-IN-CHEEK OFF>

>>>>If free is an issue, then download VSI, and plan to spend some time getting up to speed with it. www.installsite.com is a good resource for working with VSI as well as the various versions of InstallShield out in the world.
>>>>
>>>>Hi Ed:
>>>>
>>>>Clicking on www.installsite.com took me to the installsheild site. Is that what you were referring to?
>>>
>>>No; they sold their domain name to InstallShield, and are now at www.installsite.org
>>
>>Thanks Ed.
>>
>>- Ravi