Freeware Installation Tool - Advanced Installer

So version 5 of TableSmith is finally in its last stages before release and I realized that I didn't have anything in place for its installation. An advantage of a program that uses .Net is that you can simply copy whatever files you need wherever you want them and you don't really need an installation process. However, many of the people that use TS aren't necessarily computer-savvy so I still need some standard way to install TSv5 - a setup program that does all the work for them. Previous versions of TS used VB6, which had an "Application Deployment Wizard" (or something like that) which created the setup files I needed. I didn't see anything like that with Visual C# 2005, at least not at first.

Upon further review, I discovered "ClickOnce", which is Microsoft's build-in deployment tool. Unfortunately, though rather unsurprisingly, it didn't turn out to work for me. Without going into details, the tool took what should be a simple process and made it more complicated than it needed to be. What's worse is that ClickOnce installs an application into its "application cache" on the target machine, rather than wherever the user wants it to go. Now, there are some distinct advantages to ClickOnce (such as having a program automatically update itself when a newer version is available), but for what I want it just didn't work.

Fortunately, I was able to find a freeware alternative - Advanced Installer. Intuitive and easy to use, it does exactly what I want and need it to do. There are other versions you need to pay for if you need something beyond the freeware version, but so far that's working out good for me. If you're looking for a simple tool to create installation MSI files, I'd recommend it.