CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2015wixvcredistuniversal-crt
Benj
Benj

Reputation: 32398

Is it possible to create a Wix installer project that will install a VS2015 project on a vanilla Windows 7 machine?

I've recently upgraded the project I work on to use the new Visual Studio 2015 compiler (as well as SDK 10.0 and Windows Driver Kit 10.0). I've noticed that as well as the usual change to the VC Redist merge modules this has now introduced some additional pre-requisites which users must install to be able to use the product I work on. Specifically users must have installed the Windows updates associated with the "Universal CRT" which Microsoft have blogged about here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/03/03/introducing-the-universal-crt/

I notice that they explicitly state:

“There will not be a merge module for the Universal CRT. If you currently use the CRT merge modules and still want to deploy the Visual C++ libraries centrally, we recommend that you move to the above mentioned Windows Update package or to the VCRedist”

They seem to suggest that installers should simply flag that pre-requisites are required but I'm a little worried about this because some of our business customers have agreements with us that we'll support certain builds of Windows 7 "out of the box" (i.e. without having the latest updates). Does anyone know if it's possible to embed these new pre-reqs in without merge modules in a Wix project? I.e. perhaps by including the VCRedist executables instead?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 318

Answers (1)

Bob Arnson
Bob Arnson

Reputation: 21886

Use a bundle. See http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/howtos/redistributables_and_install_checks/install_dotnet.html and, for example, VS2012 and Wix 3.6 - Installing .Net 4.5 with my application.

Upvotes: 2

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