Visual Studio Installer Concepts

Background information about important concepts related to authoring Microsoft^® Windows^® installer package (.msi) files with Microsoft^® Visual Studio^® Installer is presented in the following documents. These central ideas include:

An overview of installer projects and package files.
"Advertising" an application on a user's desktop until the user requests a full installation.
Protecting a user's machine from an unsuccessful installation.
Including shared files and code in installer projects.
Managing application components and files to be installed.
Installation run-time manipulation of the target machine system registry.
Installation and registration of COM objects.
The installation run-time user interface.

See the following sections for detailed information.

To read about	See
Installer projects and how to quickly create them with project templates	Installer Projects
The two types of package files you can create with Visual Studio Installer: Installer package (.msi) files, which run the installation Merge modules (.msm files), the Windows-installer compliant means for sharing code among .msi files	Installer Package Files and Merge Modules
Using installer components, files, and folders and relationships among these items and structures in an installer project	Installer Components, Files, and Folders
Establishing registry actions that take place as part of your product installation	Registry Actions
Creating and manipulating document and MIME types, associations among file extensions and verbs, and COM objects	Installer Associations
Establishing and customizing the installation dialogs displayed to your users when they run your installer package (.msi) file	The Installation Run-Time User Interface