Sams Teach Yourself Visual Studio® .NET 2003 in 21 Days

Creating a Windows Installer Package

The easiest way to create a new MSI package is from an existing application. To see this work, you need to create a new Windows Forms project.

Open Visual Studio .NET, create a new Windows Forms Application project, and name it InstallerTest as shown in Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2. Creating the InstallerTest application.

After the project is created, you can add a deployment template to your solution. To do so, right-click the InstallerTest solution name in the Solution Explorer, and select Add, Add New Project from the contextual menu. When the New Project dialog pops up, select the Setup and Deployment Projects ...