These days I am involved in an activity of launching one of our products in market as ISV (Independent Software Vendor). One of the activities in that is to create an Installer for the product.
The installer that is created for Web Projects through Visual Studio 2010 is quite generalized and it was felt by us that we must tweak it to some extent to fit our actual requirements.
For example, the initial screens of installer ask the user to specify a virtual directory and an application pool. For specifying the virtual directory the installer presents a TextBox and for application pool a combo box is provided. However, in our case we wanted them to be “Non-Editable” fields so that the user is only informed about the virtual directory and application pool.
After research it was found that Windows SDK contains a tool called ORCA which allows us to modify the Installer file as per our requirements
ORCA presents the installer file as a database containing number of tables. For example, there is a table named “Control” which stores information about all the controls used in the installer.
The values in the table can be modified as per the requirement. One problem that I faced is that there is not enough documentation readily available which shows how to use ORCA (Or maybe it is, but I was not able to find it). Therefore I will dedicate a future post to using ORCA.
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