Wrap C# application in .msi installer

Question

I have created a C# application in Visual Studio 2017. Now I would like to distribute my application as a single windows installer file. I was hoping for a simple one-click solution (select all the files I want to include -> voila! there's the installer). But it seems to be not that easy :-(

I often read that Visual Studio supports setup projects. But that does not seem to be the case anymore, right?

Third party tools are either very complicated (e.g. Wix, Inno Setup) or very expensive (e.g. Advanced Installer).

Is there really no simple way to wrap some files in an .msi Windows installer? Does Microsoft provide no tooling to create such installers?

Answer 1

or very expensive (e.g. Advanced Installer).

There is a also a free edition which includes a Visual Studio extension for Advanced Installer, which you can use to build MSI packages.

The following tutorial shows how you can use the features from the free edition ("Simple" project type):

• https://www.advancedinstaller.com/user-guide/tutorial-ai-ext-vs.html
• https://www.advancedinstaller.com/user-guide/tutorial-simple.html

P.S. I work on the team building Advanced Installer.