War Setup!

General purpose installation program for programs created with MSVC 4 under Windows95, NT 3.51 and NT 4. Updated to MSVC 5.0

Why I made this? Features How it works Download War Install

Why I made this?

When I released the War FTP Daemon I soon realized that I needed a setup program. Most of the "bugs" reported was due to badly installed dll files or other installations issues. So I started to look for an suitable installation program.

After a few hours searching the Net it turned out that there is no such thing as a freeware installation program. All I had available was Install Shield, which is good, but very primitive and hard to set up in the SDK edition. Also, some of the functions I needed to make a workable installation program for NT 4 was not implemented according to the documentation. As a result my Install Shield scripts ended up copying wrong DLL's under NT 4. Another problem with Install Shield is that it adds ~600Kb to the distribution.

I thought it would be an easy task to make my own install program. But I soon ran into several problems. The Installation SDK from Microsoft was not present on my MSVC 4.1 CD (at least I was unable to find it!). Also, the VerFindFile() and VerInstallFile() in the Win32 SDK turned out to not work as expected under Windows 95. And I spent almost a day figuring out and making the DDE interface for Program Manager under NT 3.51. These problems, and the pricetags on the present commercial junkware installation programs, pissed me off, and I ended up spending almost a week on this program.

I have decided to release War Install as freeware, with full source code. It is my hope that developers that use the program will spend a little time improving the source code, so that this program, over some time, can be superior to all the commercial installation programs.

Note: War Install is not designed for diskette based installations. It is ment for CD-ROM and Internet releases only.

Features

War Install consist of three executable programs:

1. War Install Wizard that creates the distribution file. (.zip and .exe)
2. War Setup that is the "setup.exe" program the user executes to install your applications
3. War Uninstall that uninstalls an installation made by setup.exe.

• Graphical Interface on the Installation Setup Wizard that creates the distribution files.
• Full support for shared dll files and their counters in the Regitery.
• Native support for target installation on Windows 95, Windows NT 3.51 and Windows NT 4. This includes installation of updated dll files that are currently in use by the system.
• Full support for Uninstall from the menu or Win95/NT4 control panel.
• Capable of picking the source files from anywhere on your disks. No need to make an extra copy of your release files prior to running the Install Wizard.
• Creates one .zip file and one self extranting .exe archive of your distribution. You can choose whether to distribute the .zip or the .exe version. The selfextracting achive can be read and processed by any unzipper (unzip.exe, pkunzip.exe, WinZip...).

Limitations:

• No support for Windows 3.x, Win32s or NT versions prior to 3.51.
• The packed files are stored with their original names. This makes it possible to extract and install the files manually, but it makes it impossible to have several files with the same name, even if the files will be installed in different directories. It is possible to get around this limitation - I do have ways to install files like Ctl3d32.dll on different systems, even if the file have the same name.

How it works

When you start a new project War Install Wizard will add all standard files needed to create a typical MSVC 4 based ditsribution. That includes Setup.exe, Uninstall.exe and the standard dll files for Win95 and NT. You can add and remove files as you wish.

Then, add the needed file to the Program Files class, and add ant additional classes you need for your project. Each class has flags that determine what operating systems it should be installed on, and if it is part of the default standard and minimum installation modes.

When you add files you can specify that they shall appear on the start menu, and an optional destination directory and name. You can also specify if the files are System shared files or Shared files (typically your own dll's).

When you are done adding files, you press the [Install] button, and your project is created. The Wizard will create a subdirectory under it's working directory with the same name as the project name. All distribution files are copied to this directory, and a .zip and .exe file built. The next time you

To edit an existing project, press the [...] buttom and go to the projects directory. Then choose the Setup.inf file and press [Open]. The Setup.inf file is used by the Install Wizard to re-load an existing project, and by the Setup program to install the files on the target system.

Below you can see the Install Wizard main dialog.

Download War Install

Latest official release: 1.12
Release date: Apr 26. 1997
Size: 971 KB
Go to the Download page

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