+1 for Inno Setup!

Building an installation for a software application is sometimes approached as if it were an afterthought. It shouldn’t be. It’s the first thing about your application that your users see and as such it has to be top-class, meaning robust, flexible, field-tested to destruction and attractive in appearance.

Back in the 90s, installation software was notoriously expensive to buy, bloated to distribute and run, and riddled with undocumented glitches. Some of InstallShield’s monolithic offerings come to mind.

That’s all changed now. Any serious developer should check out Inno Setup. Brainchild of Jordan Russell, Inno Setup is free. It is also as robust as they come and, with its Pascal scripting language, is fully customisable. Best of all, it is light-weight, creating remarkably small installation EXEs.

If you are a developer feeling constrained by your current installation development software, checking out Inno will be well worth it.