The S.F.T. Setup Gizmo

Another SETUP Utility?

It seems that there are already 'enough' SETUP utilities out there, or so many might think. Aside from the automatic SETUP utilities that Microsoft® uses for their own software updates, there are at least 2 other companies out there that are already established and are creating SETUP and UNINSTALL utilities for developers.

However, it was MY opinion that these utilities lacked a basic simplicity that would make creating an application setup, especially for independent developers that don't ship megabytes of "shared components" and subtle operating system upgrades with every application that they write. Sure, having the ABILITY to ship shared components is still important, especially for applications written in languages like Visual Basic, or when 'third party tools' are being included with an application. But configuring the SETUP utilities that have been made available up to this point has been painful, often as difficult as writing the application itself, especially when the application is relatively simple.

So, with the introduction a few years ago of Microsoft's "Cabinet SDK" and free re-distribution, I wrote a front-end application, SETUP application, and UNINSTALL application that work together with the "Cabinet SDK" to produce a professional-looking and reliable SETUP system.

SFT Setup Gizmo makes it extremely easy to create a CD-ROM, diskette, or self-extracting SETUP image from the specified files. The self-extracting image can be downloaded from the internet (as it is with the Setup Gizmo 'Demo') and can be configured to automatically install with the default options (useful for encapsulated components like ActiveX controls and fonts that require special handling).
You can also optionally change the compression method (LZ compression is usually best, but takes the longest), mark the application for 'quiet' setup (minimum user interaction), and under what circumstances you want to prompt the user to reboot the machine.
The 'Save Configuration' button allows you to save your SETUP into a '.GIZ' file, which greatly resembles a windows 'INI' file. The types of entries in this file are documented in the help file, so that you can manually edit the '.GIZ' file if you need to.
The SFT Setup Gizmo also has 'BATCH' capability from the command line, so that you can use a '.bat' or '.cmd' file to load a previously saved '.GIZ' file, specify the options from the 'finish' page (such as image type and compression type), and automatically create the SETUP image based on the settings in the '.GIZ' file. If the setup is successful, the SFT Setup Gizmo application will return '0' to indicate success, or a non-zero error code otherwise, so that the 'ERRORLEVEL' value in a '.bat' or '.cmd' file can be used to test for success or failure automatically.
Of all of the features of the SFT Setup Gizmo, this last one is probably the most useful for software developers that produce large software packages. In my own projects, I frequently use a single '.bat' or '.cmd' file to build an application along with all of its associated components, then copy the output files to a single directory tree, from which the SFT Setup Gizmo builds the setup into one or more formats. In fact, the Setup Gizmo project does exactly this from its 'build_it.bat' file. Often I might want to build multiple SETUPS (such as 'demo version' and 'retail version') from the same files, with slight differences that only the SETUP needs to know about. So I will produce multiple '.giz' files, each one with its own special settings or file sets, and build a separate setup image for each type of install.

The SFT Setup Gizmo is NOW an open source project, available for download on github, as the Setup Gizmo Project.

GENERAL PRODUCT INFORMATION:

• Simplified UI design makes creating a complex setup extremely easy by comparison to other SETUP products
• FAST FAST FAST - no 'piggy' configuration of 'the installer' or excessive re-booting (unlike other SETUP utilities)
• Advanced settings extend the simplified UI for those who need additional capabilities
• SETUP command line options allow embedded self-extracting setups to run in 'ultra quiet' mode (no user interaction) and to use pre-assigned path names from the command line
• Optional component selection is pre-assigned during upgrades, based on what was previously installed. 'Ultra Quiet Mode' self-extracting setups invoked from a command line can have an option list pre-assigned from the command line as well.
• Aggressive 'need to boot' detection delays 'exec after copy' and DLL registration until reboot, and detects when an embedded SETUP has made any 'delayed file copy/rename' operations or added SETUP elements to the 'RunOnce' registry key.
• Permissions check during SETUP, prompts for 'privileged' logon if user's privilege is not sufficient to run SETUP (new feature for version 1.1.2 - see 'Order' page to download). This is particularly useful for Windows XP 'home' edition
• 'Exec after Copy' and 'Delete after Exec' make embedded setups and 'Run Once' or 'setup helper' utilities extremely easy to include in the application's setup process. Such utilities can perform ANY kind of custom action that is not already a part of the Setup Gizmo.
  Rather than having to support every imaginable capability that anyone MIGHT want, the better approach is to make it easy to include a simple 'helper app' within the SETUP, then automatically execute (and optionally delete) it.
• An optional 'uninstall command line' for 'exec after copy' entries invokes these applications (the ones that weren't deleted by 'delete after exec') during uninstall as well, allowing the more difficult or complex cleanup operations to be performed by the application itself.
  By encapsulating the app's registration and uninstall cleanup within the application itself, then marking the application 'exec after copy', with arguments for both setup and uninstall (such as '/SETUP' and '/UNINST') such an application can be more easily modified in future revisions without affecting the remaining system or the setup process.
• NO SHARED COMPONENTS! SMALL EXECUTABLES ANYWAY! The Setup Gizmo front-end, and the supporting applications SETUP.EXE, UNINST.EXE, and AutoRun.EXE are all 'self-contained', and as stated above, 'self-reliant', and require NO special DLL's or shared components (specifically, those annoying run-time language support DLL's) to be installed on the user's operating system before they can load or execute the SETUP you created.
  HOWEVER, SETUP.EXE and UNINST.EXE will gladly (and correctly) handle any shared components that YOUR application might need during SETUP, including any embedded self-extracting SETUP applications for things like ODBC drivers, Speech API, WININET, ActiveX controls, and so on, even the '.Net' run-time.
  The SETUP application itself about 300k in size, and the uninstaller less than 200k in size. Typically the uninstaller will compress to a significantly smaller size, approximately 85k using LZ Compression. So the total overhead for the SETUP application for a self-extracting SETUP could be as little as 390k bytes, while retaining the benefits of a full-featured self-extracting installer.
• Whenever possible, temporary files that cannot be deleted during SETUP or UNINSTALL are stored in the 'temp' directory, and cleaned up on the next reboot.
• Compatible with "code signing" (certificates), and uses standard '.CAB' files and the Microsoft Cabinet SDK