photoSuru install experience

Realizing that i don’t have any decent photo slideshow player installed on my machine I thought I’d install photoSuru and see what it can do for me.

While it’s a beautiful subscription-based WPF photo viewer, built on a Syndicated Client Experiences (SCE) Starter Kit , it was something else that caught my eye:

What kind of installer is this? Looks like the application itself… did I already install it and it’s now updating itself?

Yes, photoSuru is a ClickOnce application. Deployment-wise, it uses a hybrid MSI/ClickOnce installer, providing a consistent look, matching the appearance of the application itself. If you’ve deployed any ClickOnce application before, you know that you had no power to change that dull install dialog in any way.

.NET 3.5 SP1 changed this. With SP1 installed, you now do have the power to customize and brand your application’s progress dialog, including optional end-user license agreement page, localization, etc., you just have to do it all by putting together a bunch of Xml files, describing what you want it to look like.  Yup, there is no visual support for this yet (as in Visual Studio 2008 SP1). The future looks bright, though. Client Profile Configuration Designer is currently a part of WPF Futures, a taste of what is about to come. You can download and play with it - it’s certainly going to be of some help to you, at least to get you started and set up the basic dialogs and progress flow, but you might still have to get into the Xml files to fine-tune some details.

I’ve tried the CPC Designer with one of my WPF apps some time ago and I did manage to put together a quite decent looking installer, it just took me more time as it would if I went with the default ClickOnce option. But that goes without saying, doesn’t it?