I’ve decided to write this article during compiling my InstallShield project. It’s been roughly a month of development and my installer is nowhere near ready.
My project is not too complex either, only that I was tasked to build an installer without any prior experience with InstallShield.
Firstly there are other options. You can Google these, all I’m saying is there are 2 other install products out there which are better in every way than InstallShield.
InstallShield is the worst installer on the market
It’s not that it’s slightly bad, or needs a few minor improvements. It’s outrageously terrible. I have to question how Flexera are even in business. And it’s not just me, anyone who uses this product will experience extreme levels of frustration.
Things you can expect to encounter
- Random build failures for no good reason. Simply retrying the build works
- No way to dynamically update text edit text.
- Constant crashes, crashing visual studio
- Having to code both sides of a boolean expression. For example Button.Enabled = property – you would need to code in the button.Disabled property too.
- Incredibly cumbersome UI. Performing the same action from different dialogs gives different results.
- All the basic MSI limitations, so what’s the point of InstallShield?
- Terrible help system
- The forums are a ghost town
- Flexera support – non existent (Do not monitor the forums)
- No training videos, help yourself by trial and error mentality
- Forced InstallShield branding
- No way to customize icons for dialogs
- No way to force upper case in text areas
- Controls misalign just by selecting them
- Service packs not available for public download
- No control events, like keypress in a text box, only onblur
More………
I’m purposely not going to talk about the competition, but if given any choice, NEVER go with this product or you’ll be ripping your hair out.
If you have any say in it, don’t give this company your business and actively boycott it.
Michael's Techbox 