Matt J. Wilson

Based on a lot of the hits to this blog, it seems like a lot of people are simply trying to understand Inno Setup. I hope this blog post will be useful; I’m not going to refer to any code here as I believe the other examples on this blog should suffice, but here is a brief outline of Inno Setup and ISTool.

First, you probably want to download a copy of Inno Setup. Inno Setup is basically a great, free alternative to other packaging solutions (InstallShield, etc.). There is a graphical, wizard interface that will suffice for building some of the basics of your project, but if you aren’t a programmer you’ll still have difficulties.

This is where ISTool comes in. ISTool adds a graphical layer on top of Inno Setup that allows non-programmers to create almost any type of script they desire in an easy-to-use UI. Even though I know how to write scripts in Inno Setup, I still use ISTool to form the basis of almost all of my scripts.

Another huge advantage of ISTool? It allows you to implement a download component into Inno Setup, which makes it very straight forward to add files to be download from the internet during an installation (view a sample of using the isxdl.dll included with ISTool).

Still have questions? Feel free to contact me.

At one of my previous employers, we had several remote deployments (hundreds, actually) and a need to track remote errors in a central location; we utilized an ASP site to visually display this combined collection of errors.

I’ve taken the time to rewrite my own central error tracking mechanism from scratch. This module includes text logs that automatically rotate themselves once a file reaches a certain size (no more trying to have someone email you a 3 GB text file), useful information about what type of error occurred, and a SQL CE database that stores these errors in a local database, counting the number of incidences and whether there is fresh information to report on a schedule to the central database.

There is also a central web service that accepts these exception reporting requests and inserts them into a central SQL database for you to do with what you will (ASP website, Excel sheets with queries, etc., etc.). You can find a copy of this solution (Visual Studio 2005 written in C#) here.