Is there no better Installer project in Visual Studio 2013 than the Setup projects or WiX?
I have a .vdproj and some WiX projects since Visual Studio 2008 which I no
There is also Advanced Installer which have a Visual Studio Installer extension (with UI) which is available in their free edition (from what I know). Their Installer extension for VS is also MSBuild compatible.
I used the extension Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension: VSI_Bundle. See the The Visual Studio Blog
It worked good for me.
WiX is the default way to go for free solutions that need to do advanced steps and must be able to integrate into Team Build and MSBuild.
Product Free/Paid VS designer MsBuild Support
InstallShield LE free yes yes
InstallShield Pro paid yes yes
InstallAware paid yes yes 3)
Advanced Installer free yes yes
NSIS free no no
MS VS Installer Projects free yes no
Wix Toolset free no 1) yes
InnoSetup free no no
PS App Deploy Toolkit free no 2) no
Remarks:
Links to products:
Remember that Team Build 2013 has a set of native extension points that allow you to execute PowerShell scripts after build which can trigger pretty much every type of installer project you need. Non-MSBuild-based systems like the PS AppDeploy Toolkit or NSIS can be triggered with relative ease this way.
XML and script-based UI's are generally easier to merge and branch and provide better maintainability over time as you're pretty much free to define the modules in separate files and provide comments on why certain files are deployed where or which commands are executed when.