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I've never burnt a visual studio program to a CD before. I've made a setup project with all my program files, and it works fine. Do I simply need to burn the following installer files onto the CD and give it to someone?

The installer is a folder containing:

-DotNetFX35 (Folder): Contains .net requirements for my program.

-WIndowsInstaller3_1 (Folder): WindowsInstaller-KB893803-v2-x86.exe

-setup.exe

-My Installer.msi

Sorry for the seemingly easy question. I'm double checking as I have one CD and an impatient employer.

Thanks!

OCER
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    Make an ISO to avoid wasting CDs :-) It will allow you to verify if your installation contains all the necessary files. – Darin Dimitrov Jan 03 '11 at 13:52
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    "I have __one__ CD and an impatient employer" - also a very frugal employer. Buy a pack of CD's, you're bound to make a mistake or 2. – H H Jan 03 '11 at 13:53
  • As Darin Dimitrov said you can create an ISO with the files to try it out and then use a tool like Daemontools to virtually run the ISO. That way you can see what the user will see without actually writing anything on your CD yet. –  Jan 03 '11 at 13:58
  • @Darin: How do I make an ISO? Nero Burning it is. I'll look into it. Thanks everyone! @Henk: I'm testing burning on my own personal CD's at the moment. ;) – OCER Jan 03 '11 at 13:58
  • @OCER, no Daemon Tools is intended for mounting existing ISO files, not creating. You could create an ISO with Nero Burning ROM. – Darin Dimitrov Jan 03 '11 at 14:01
  • @Darin: Do you have a link by chance? I've found a few... is it this? http://www.afterdawn.com/software/cd_dvd/burning/nero.cfm – OCER Jan 03 '11 at 14:04
  • @OCER You can also use this opensource alternative 'DoIso', the download can be found here: http://opensource.ebswift.com/DoISO/ –  Jan 03 '11 at 14:04
  • Also, get yourself a copy of VirtualPC or VMWare or Virtual Box so you can create vanilla installs of your target versions of Windows and can then repeatedly run your install process into it until it works. (You can use the .ISO for this) – Murph Jan 03 '11 at 14:06

1 Answers1

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You will need to add an autorun.inf if you want autorun to work. Put the contents of the install folder at the root of the disk, create a simple text file called "autorun.inf" at the root of the disk and add the following contents:

[autorun] 
open=setup.exe

This will instruct the operating system to run setup.exe when the disk has inserted (and consented to it).

There are other tricks you can do with autorun.inf too. As many have mentioned in the comments, the best way to test this is by creating an ISO and testing it, or buying a stack of blank disks. They are pretty cheap these days.

If you don't care about auto run, then you can put anything on the disk itself, it's just content, the user would just need to go into the contents himself and click setup.

vcsjones
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