Hi All,

I know it's a bit perjorative to just come right out and say what we all know about InstallShield. But I just had to do it.

Let me tell you a little bit about my first experience with it...

When I first saw that VFP7 included InstallShield, frankly I was stoked! I had hacked my share of VFP installations in the past and I figured a professional product like IS had to be better than that.

Now I don't really use the Installation builder that much in the first place. The majority of my work is at client's locations on in-house applications. All I normally do is refresh the EXE file and that's it for me, but I've had this desire lately to create some share-ware apps and I that's why seeing InstallShield in the box really excited me.

So I built this little WebCalendarBuilder application using VFP7. What it does is it helps you build your calendar and posts them up to the site of your choosing. The bundled app comes with an example calendar that includes a ton of event pages (one per event).

My first experience using IS was miserable (to say the least). Here's what happened:

First IS runs really, really slowly. I swear they must be using Access as their data table because when it tried to suck my 200 files into the build, the damn thing almost died! Can you believe that? Sucking in 200 files would take 5 minutes? Unbelievable!!!

Next (after stumbling around their largely undocumented interface -most of which is blocked until you buy an upgrade) I finally built my build. So I burnt it on a CD.

Since I wanted to test my install on a "clean machine" (one without any VFP runtime files, etc.) I enlisted a friend who said I could use his laptop for my experiment. What a huge mistake that turned out to be! For some reason the install failed (why? I have absolutely no idea -I think it was missing a .dll that MS needed to perform the install), then I couldn't restart the machine. It kept reverting back to the failed installation but wouldn't go any farther.

I ended up having to reformat the guy's harddrive. It literally took me weeks to replace all the support files that his machine needed to operate without blowing up! What a freaking nightmare!!!

Of course somewhere along the line I go on the IS support site and what a joke that site is. At that time there was absolutely NO help for VFP coders. In fact there was no response to my request that they make a site for VFP coders. Is there any now?

So, since I will never run InstallShield again for the reasons cited above I had to find a suitable replacement. Here's where my story gets better.

I found this little installer called Astrum Installer. Here's the link:

http://www.thraexsoftware.com/aiw/

This is a great little program. It's fast, flexible, does a great build and at a $35 registration is way cheap!

Now if I were you (and I just may be), I'd dump InstallShield and go with these guys. InstallShield doesn't need us and frankly, we don't need them either.

#END_OF_RANT

Hugh