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Tarma Expert Install 3.1, $189 Tarma Expert Install is an application for building setup programs - those little applications that lay down the bits for other applications on your hard drive. It offers the developer a choice between Tarma's own proprietary setup engine and Microsoft's standard MSI installer technology, and is well-designed and easy to use. While it does not support all of the outlandish scenarios of the expensive competitors such as Wise or InstallShield, TEI does an excellent job of building straightforward installers that can easily handle the 90% case for most applications. If your requirements are not unusual and you aren't doing so much setup work that building installers is your full-time job, it's definitely worth a look. Using TEI is pretty simple. You create a new project (starting from scratch or importing an existing MSI setup), and then click through a variety of sections (system requirements, files and folders, features and components, and so on) to set the parameters of the created installer. Among the things you have complete control over here are registry keys, INI file values, environment variables, COM classes, services and drivers, and file and MIME types. You can also customize the dialog boxes and action sequence used by the installer itself (Tarma's own installer is more flexible than MSIs in this regard). The various editors are well-designed and you'll seldom need to refer to the help file if you're familiar with the basic principles of writing an installer. Everything is designed to be localizable, and if you're using the Tarma engine you can even package multiple languages into a single file. There is basic support for including .NET assemblies in your setup, though no integrated support for COM interop or for automatic download of the .NET Framework. When you're done writing the setup, you can go through a Build/Test/Fix cycle until it's perfect. One of the best aspects of TEI turns up here: it makes hundreds of "preflight" checks to make sure that you haven't unwittingly violated one of the rules about how installers should be constructed to be good Windows citizens. Any violations show up in a diagnostics pane in the user interface, and double-clicking them takes you straight to the appropriate spot in the process where you need to fix something. This makes it very easy for the novice author to get things right, and should save a considerable amount of frustration down the road. Using TEI should make it much harder to ship a broken installer than it is with some other products in the field. I had no trouble getting up and running quickly with TEI; I ran into one small problem (caused by my own bullheaded refusal to read help files) which tech support was able to sort out for me very quickly. The help file in the just-released version 3.1 needs some work yet, having TODO flags left in various places, notably the descriptions of what to do about many of the preflight warnings, but other than that this appears to be a nicely polished product. You can download a trial version from Tarma's site, which is completely functional except that it runs in a trial mode where the installers can run on any system but expire 8 hours after being built.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics. Published April 25, 2006 |
