Creating and Opening Installer Projects
To use Microsoft® Visual Studio® Installer, first create or open a Microsoft® Windows® installer project (.wip file) in your Visual Studio solution. The solution may contain more than one Windows installer project. For example, you might develop a single-user version and an enterprise version of your installer package file; these would require two separate Windows installer projects in your solution. Your solution might also contain other projects and information.
The installer projects you create in a solution contain all the information necessary to install the application on target machines. Once you have built the installer project (.wip file) into an installer package (.msi) file, you can distribute the .msi file for application installations. For more information about building .msi files, see Building an Installer Package (.msi) File.
Visual Studio Installer provides several project templates to help you get started creating installer projects. When you select the icon for one of these templates, you set default configurations for the installer project as you create it.
The Empty Installer template creates an empty installer project to which you manually add all project outputs and files.
The Empty Merge Module template creates an empty merge module project you can configure and then build into a merge module (.msm file).
The Microsoft® Visual Basic® Installer template provides a one-step Wizard-like dialog to help you create an installer project that contains project outputs from a Visual Basic project you specify. For more information, see Visual Basic Setup Wizard Dialog Box.
Note For information about creating an installer project for an international product, see Creating an Installer Project for a Localized Installer Package (.msi) File or Merge Module (.msm File).
After creating or opening a Visual Studio Installer project, you can review or change the default properties of the project.
To create a Visual Studio Installer project
Click the File menu, and then click New Project.
Click the Visual Studio Installer Projects folder in the Visual Studio folder.
Choose the type of installer project you want to create.
To create an empty installer project, double-click the Empty Installer icon.
To create an empty merge module, double-click the Empty Merge Module icon.
To create a Visual Basic installer project, double-click the Visual Basic Installer icon and then complete the resulting dialog box. For more information about working with the Visual Basic project dependencies imported into the installer project, see Working with Visual Basic Project Dependencies.
Visual Studio Installer creates your installer project. The Project Explorer displays your installer project hierarchy. You can expand the Target Machine node to start setting up the configuration of your installed product on the target machine.
To open a Visual Studio Installer project
Click the File menu, and then click Open Project.
Click the Existing tab.
In the Existing list, navigate to the installer project. To open it, select the installer project and then click Open.
The Project Explorer displays your installer project hierarchy.
To set project properties
For information about installer project properties and how to set or change them, see the Project Properties Dialog Box topic.