Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension - Install a Service

Question

I'm using the Visual Studio Installer Projects Extension to create a .msi for my project.

The installer seems to work ok for the most part, but it won't kick off my service after install and I have to run MyService.exe manually.

Is there a way to do this? Or could I inject some custom installer code somewhere?

Answer 1

Viusal Studio Installer projects don't expose Windows Installer's underlying ServiceInstall / ServiceControl tables. This forces developers to reinvent the wheel using custom actions resulting in fragile installers.

Windows Installer XML can author merge modules that properly implement ServiceInstall / Service Control. You can then reference that merge module into your Visual Studio Installer to accomplish the task with breaking best practices. A discussion of this can be found here:

Augmenting InstallShield using Windows Installer XML - Windows Services

Redemption of Visual Studio Deployment Projects

IsWiX Tutorials - How to author a Windows Service using WiX / IsWiX

Answer 2

See if this helps:

http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/msi/tips.htm

Scroll down to Installing Services with Visual Studio.

It's a tool for adding the ServiceInstall/ServiceControl features to a VS setup. I haven't updated it for a while but all the source is there.

Answer 3

Microsoft has described the process of creating a service installer in this MSDN article: How to: Add Installers to Your Service Application