How to Create a Setup file in Visual Studio 2019 | C# VB.Net installer creation | MSI EXE

hey everyone so if you've created an application in c sharp or vb.net and you need to create an installer for it such as an msi or exe then this is going to be the video for you because i'm going to show you step by step how to do that it's a pretty easy process and it just requires an extension that is a microsoft developed extension so it's not going to be some third-party product it's really hard to use so yeah that's about it it's not going to be terribly complicated but if you do find this helpful could you please like and subscribe because it would really help the channel out and then we could get out there and help more people all right so let's get right into it all right so the first thing we're going to need to do is grab the extension that's required so the extension is called microsoft visual studio installer projects um you can go to online and then search for this extension if it's not showing up for you in the top of the list but it's one of the most downloaded extensions so i'm going to grab that we're gonna go ahead and download it and now we need to restart visual studio to get it to install and as soon as you close visual studio this little extension installer will install it so we're gonna go ahead and hit modify and yeah just let it progress on through and it can take a second to install but it really doesn't take that long it'll just take a minute or so alright so once it's finished installing you can open visual studio again you want to open the project that you want to create the installer for because it's going to be a second project inside the same solution alright so now that we've got our extension ready to go we're going to right click on the solution up here and we're going to add a new project and this new project is going to be a setup project so i'm going to go up here and search for the setup project template and it's going to be this right here it says new which is kind of helpful but yeah just a little setup project so i'm going to call it uh storage setup because this is a little password storage application i made that i'm creating this setup for okay so now once you've got to this point you will have a new storage setup project over here evil storage is my like application that i've developed and then storage setup is the new project for our setup so this project has three folders it has an application folder which is the the folder where your like exe and all of its assembly files are going to be then a folder for the user's desktop and then a folder for the user's program menu so first we go to the application folder and we're going to add a new project output so this is going to copy over the exe and other required dlls that your project outputs when you build it this is going to be what's normally in like your debug folder um all right so from here we can create a shortcut so this is going to be my desktop shortcut i'm going to call it evil storage okay so i'm going to import a file actually into here which is going to be our icon because i have a custom icon that i'm going to use so then you can go to your new desktop shortcut and you can change the icon so i just right click properties over here you have icon and click browse click browse again go into your application folder and then you can choose the icon so now this will have that same icon that i would like i can drag it over to the user's desktop then i'm going to create one more shortcut that i'm also going to call evil storage and i'm going to go to its properties again we're going to add the icon again same icon you have to have the icon file in your applications folder to be able to access it so now i'm going to create a new folder in the program menu called evil co which is just going to be the subfolder for the application in the user's program menu they're just usually in a subfolder so that's why we're doing that so then we just drag our shortcut in there so we have our desktop we have that and we're pretty much ready to go as far as the shortcuts go so if we click on our new setup project and we go to the properties window we can actually change um the author which i'm going to set it to evil co and then we can give um an e we can give a description to the application i'm just saying evil description and there's a bunch of other stuff that you can set up like a support phone number support url like this is like the website and stuff like that but i'm just going to change the author description and i'll also change the manufacturer because that's used for the install location so i'm going to save those changes and now i'm going to go to the properties for this new project and you can actually go to prerequisites down here and you can make the net framework a prerequisite so i have 4.7.2 by default which is fine and it will automatically download the net framework from microsoft's website when the user does the setup which is really handy another thing you can do is go to the configuration manager and change the evil storage and storage setup change them to the release versions this is just showing because i had an old project in here that needs to be deleted but yeah you just take your main project and this project and change them to release from debug so that's all you really do in here so once you've got all that set up you can click build on your setup project and it will build the project and actually create the msi and the exe for your project okay so once it finishes building you can right click and open folder and file explorer go to release because we chose the release version and then go to setup.exe and that will run your installation wizard you can click next a few times through that and it will properly install the application if you go to your desktop there's going to be a new desktop shortcut there that will open your application and if you go to your start menu and all programs i have a special little start menu here because i liked the windows 7 one but that's a whole other thing but yeah under all programs there's also the option there for me and last but not least would be going to your programs and features and then looking for evil storage here but yeah that's pretty much it if your goal was just to create an installer package um that pretty much covers everything i think you'll need to know to get started the key to all of this is that microsoft digital studio installer projects and creating the new project and just setting up the settings and going through the menus so yeah that about wraps up creating an installer package in visual studio i hope this was helpful and if you wouldn't mind liking and subscribing it would really help the channel out and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Darren Does Everything

Views: 63,002

Keywords: how to create setup file in visual studio, c#, .net, how to create setup.exe in visual studio 2019, visual studio setup project, how do i create a setup file in visual studio, how to create msi package in visual studio 2019, create an msi file, create setup application c#, create installation setup file, how to create msi installer in visual studio, visual studio installer project, how to create setup file, CodAffection, FoxLearn, Visual Studio 2019, VS2019, VB.Net

Id: 7iVIfkVHKII

Length: 7min 42sec (462 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021