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Introduction

This document describes wxWindows Install, a simple installation utility for Windows. Although it is distributed as part of the wxWindows project, it can be used for installing any relatively simple Windows application.

The standard Microsoft Setup toolkit, although very flexible, is extremely complex to understand and use. It also requires you to distribute many DLLs and files on your installation disk that may almost fill the first disk, forcing you to use two disks where one would suffice. For simple installation needs that do not need the power of the Microsoft toolkit, a free alternative is required.

It is possible to produce an installation disk in a matter of minutes, with no coding involved. For special installation needs, it's possible you might want to add code to the standard program, but most projects will not require it.

All you do is produce an install.inf file detailing the files being distributed, Program Manager icons, what to run after installation, etc. Then distribute your files along with install.exe, install.inf. The user runs install.exe which reads install.inf, offers some choices of destination directory and file groups to install, and proceeds with the copying, decompressing, and optional creation of a Program Manager group and icons. If disk changes are needed, the user will be prompted.

You may have some DLLs which must be copied to the Windows system directory: this can be specified in install.inf. This way, there will not be the confusion that typically surrounds the installation of programs that require CTL3DV2.DLL and other such DLLs.

Some of the files will typically be compressed using Microsoft's compress.exe program found in the wxWindows Install bin directory. If this compression method is not sufficient, you can specify your own DOS or Windows compression program to execute.

See the example install.inf in the docs directory: use this as a template for your own files.

A couple of notes about the implementation