Documentation, What Documentation? Setup.

I have been having fun lately trying to use msdn and msdn2 in order to obtain useful information about the .NET Framework.

This is rather frustrating as it appears that at least 50% of the documentation has been automatically generated from the code and provides little more detail than the intellisense. I would expect examples in all non-trivial classes plus references to related attributes and interfaces. It would also be useful if links to tutorials were included.

Over the past week I have been posting about getting databinding to work in a programatically controlled manner. Most of the information to do this was found via blogs. It appears that MSDN2 has been based upon the maze in Classic Adventure.

Today I have been looking for a tutorial on how to get the Setup project to work. The UI for this in VS2005 is very counter-intuative and the defaults are not very good.

My first step was to go to msdn2 and search for “setup project tutorial”.

The first link is here. This is completely useless. It tells us nothing that you can guess from the IDE.  This article is actually part of a crystal reports installation tutorial.

What should you enter as the project name? 

After a bit more hunting around I found the following page.

Here is a list of the properties used in the installer. 

It would appear that ProductName is a rather important property to be set. This is the one used by the add/remove programs option. Other important items are the version and the Product code.

I intend to follow up on this article with a detailed tutorial on how to write a setup project.