Setup Improvements

I'm using Inno Setup for the yaTimer installation program, and the biggest challenge is getting the .net framework installed.

I'm using a modified version of the script from this post on the joel on software business of software board, in the previous version of the setup program I used this script almost as-is (I just replaced .net 2.0 with 3.0), this solved the problem of getting .net installed but the user experience was very poor.

If you don't have .net 3.0 it will be downloaded with the isxdl component, this has an acceptable user interface, after the download it will run the .net setup - this is where things go bad, after you click the famous "I agree" button the .net setup program will minimize itself into the notification area (near the clock), at that point there is no visual feedback about the installation progress and my setup program just stands there looking stuck and waiting for the .net install to finish.

My solution to this poor user experience is to hide the yaTimer setup just before the .net setup is started and popup a window that looks like the yaTimer setup telling the user to please wait, while this is nowhere as nice as a progress bar it's better then my setup program looking like it's stuck on the last page of the setup wizard.

At this point I don't know what I can do to improve the setup experience even more, but I'm open to suggestions.

Now I'm getting back to working on yaTimer itself, you can expect version 1.0.1 to be released sometime in the next few days (probably Saturday or Sunday)

posted @ Thursday, March 22, 2007 11:44 PM

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