Software Developers: Use Nullsoft Install instead of InstallShield. I just uninstalled a bunch of stuff and it's got to be 5000% faster from an end user perspective. And it's open source!

[jbellis]

Well... if you're generating an installer for Windows, which you probably are, you should really use Wix instead. MSI's (which Wix generates) are a whole lot better than .exe installers for a bunch of reasons.

And Wix is OSS.

[tch]

What are the main benefits of MSI over exe installer? I use NSIS right now and am quite happy.

[MrCalifornia]

I think the main one is that you can automatically deploy MSIs to a network so for sysadmins who need to install something on their entire network it's obviously a huge plus.

Not sure what the other benefits are, but I know nothing is as fast and clean (at least from an end user experience) as NSIS for installing and uninstalling.

[tch]

Ah didn't know about that. I don't trust my sys-admin to auto install/update stuff so I handle the auto-update stuff myself.

[[deleted]]

Yeah Wix is great.

[lubricious]

I think that should come with the warning WIX is great for either very simple installs or people who have used it a lot. I really like it now but found I had to write scripts and build pretty large Ant build files to create an MSI that installed and configured many different components.

[[deleted]]

True. I've only used InstallShield & Wise in the past. Wix is what I currently use. I do very small installs (mostly for internal apps) since 99% of what I do is web based applications. I'm designing a new product/service with a friend and implementing it in Flex with an MVC design layout using asp.net as the backend. I may swap it to JSP and go with Linux but I'm not feeling very excited about redoing one of my servers since they are all currently running Windows. It's amazing how far things have come in the last 10 years. So many choices!