How to create a silent installer package using Visual Studio 2008

Question

I am using Visual Studio2008 for my development and i want to create a silent set up package i.e. i don't want any UI to come up during installation. Is it possible to create a silent installer MSI using Visual Studio and if not then are there any other tools to do the same?

Solution 1

The MSI runs silently with the appropriate command line options, I don't think there is any way around that. See here - you have to use the /q switch.

An alternative is NSIS.

Solution 2

An addition to what ocdecio said (which is absolutely correct):

If you want to make silent installation the default, i.e. the standard install action when a user double-clicks your setup file, you can wrap your MSI in a self-extracting executable file created by IExpress.

IExpress is included with Windows and allows you to specify a command to be executed after the IExpress-package has been extracted. In your case you would have to specify

msiexec /i mySetup.msi /q

as the installation command (in certain cases you would need /qn to absolutely suppress all dialogs).