Create a Setup Application for your project using Microsoft visual studio 2008

To Create a Setup project for your application you can use MVS2008 Setup wizard. In this article i show you how to do this.This is the simplest way of doing it but if you want to add more features you can also customize it.

Using Setup wizard it creates two files

• Setup.exe - Include a bootstrap to look prerequisite 
• <application>.msi

You can also customize the Setup project preperties

To do this you must already open a application.For demo just create a simple application.In these examples i create email sender application that send emails.

File -> Add New Project and Select other Project types -> Setup and Deployment -> Setup wizard.

Name the project and click OK.

after that Setup wizard is open. click Next.

Select create a setup for windows application and click Next.

tic Primary Output from email and click Next. 

In here you can add additional files for your setup directory such as Readme file.. after adding additional files click Next to continue.

Click Finish.

Now you can see in the Solution Explorer setup files is there..

In the Properties window you can change the author , company name and lot of things there..

Now in the menu area select Build -> Build Setup(Your setup name). In my pro Build -> Build Email Setup

After that go to your project directory in there you can see the setup(Your Setup name Dir) folder.Inside that folder double click Debug. Now you can see that .exe file , .msi file. Double click setup.exe and it will install the file to your computer.

Now go to default installation directory path and you can see the file is there with .exe extension and other additional files that you add in your installation.

 

Also you can uninstall the file in Control panel or simply right click the project file to uninstall it.