Chris Smith - Generic Bootstrapper in Visual Studio 2005 | TheChannel9Team

We gave a camcorder to Mike Sampson who went over to his coworker, Chris Smith, a software developer/test on the Visual Basic team, and asked him all about the generic bootstrapper that's in Visual Studio 2005.

Follow the Discussion

Follow
Oops, something didn't work.

Try again?

Sign In to begin to follow these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in. You need to be signed in to Channel 9 to use this feature.

Getting "follow" information

Stop following these comments

Start following these comments

What does this mean?
Following an item on Channel 9 allows you to watch for new content and comments that you are interested in and view them all on your notifications page.

Removing your "follow"

Setting up your "follow"

Did you know you can
sign up for email notifications?
- Subscribe to this comments

littleguru <3 Seattle

Jun 21, 2005 at 2:08 AM

This bootstrapper is a nice feature. Is there also away to have the prerequisites build into the setup.exe? I saw that it was lying in subdir, but can I also bundle all together to have one file to ship?
leighsword LeighSword

Jun 21, 2005 at 2:48 AM

the world's greatest bootstrapper(or click once) is a simple application that's able to download their depends(a file list) at runtime.

"it's just going to... crashed.", funny, never mind.
Steve411 Me, all suited up!

Jun 21, 2005 at 3:27 AM

I love it when it crashes! Nice video!
Manip

Jun 21, 2005 at 4:45 AM

So Microsoft has ripped off 'make' and are calling it a highly confusing (and conflicting) name just for kicks. I mean a bootstrapper is already a thing, you can't re-define it!
Sampy And I come back to you now - at the turn of the tide

Jun 21, 2005 at 8:27 AM

littleguru wrote:

This bootstrapper is a nice feature. Is there also away to have the prerequisites build into the setup.exe? I saw that it was lying in subdir, but can I also bundle all together to have one file to ship?

You can't build the redists into setup.exe but you can still just ship one file if you use the homesite feature (download the pre-reqs from the package author location) or a components URL (put all the packages in a seperate location from the bootstrapper). With these, all you have to do is ship the bootstrapper and it will dowload all the prerequisites it needs.
Sampy And I come back to you now - at the turn of the tide

Jun 21, 2005 at 8:29 AM

Manip wrote:

So Microsoft has ripped off 'make' and are calling it a highly confusing (and conflicting) name just for kicks. I mean a bootstrapper is already a thing, you can't re-define it!

How is this like make at all? Make is a build script tool. Sure people have overloaded it to install after building but it doesn't download and install prerquisite packages before installing.

Am I missing something?
dotnetjunkie

Jun 21, 2005 at 1:03 PM

This is very nice!

Should have been available a few years ago already though... Man, sure would have made life much easier!

@Orbit86: stop bugging us with your Longhorn obsession please, there are far more important things with higher priority now.

littleguru <3 Seattle

Jun 21, 2005 at 2:53 PM

Sampy wrote:

littleguru wrote: This bootstrapper is a nice feature. Is there also away to have the prerequisites build into the setup.exe? I saw that it was lying in subdir, but can I also bundle all together to have one file to ship?

You can't build the redists into setup.exe but you can still just ship one file if you use the homesite feature (download the pre-reqs from the package author location) or a components URL (put all the packages in a seperate location from the bootstrapper). With these, all you have to do is ship the bootstrapper and it will dowload all the prerequisites it needs.

You should include a feature where all the stuff can be bundled into one file. I mean all the prerequisits are bundled with the setup in one file.

That's required very often. There is people (and companies) out there not letting setup go to the internet and download some files from somewhere.

But the tool is quite cool. I like the possibility to create own setup bootstrapper.

Mr. Smith

Jun 21, 2005 at 4:17 PM

Steve411 wrote:

I love it when it crashes! Nice video!

We thought about editing the video, but figured the more 'candid' demo would be best. Note however that that bug is already fixed in the latest CTP release.
Mr. Smith

Jun 21, 2005 at 4:38 PM

Just as a completely shameless plug, if you are interested in learing more about the VS 2005 Generic Bootstrapper you might want to check out the following:

My MSDN blog. This isn't totally dedicated to the Generic Bootstrapper, but if you have a question about some odd corner case or are interested in learning about what goes on behind the scenes check it out:
http://blogs.msdn.com/chrsmith

A GotDotNet workspace devoted to housing custom packages for Microsoft packages which aren't shipping with VS 2005, like the 1.1 FX.
http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=7e8e8cbd-b447-4a9d-a984-9379d1a0c190

The Bootstrapper Manifest Generator GotDotNet project. This app should help you create even the most complex manifests.
http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces/workspace.aspx?id=ddb4f08c-7d7c-4f44-a009-ea19fc812545
Pimp Daddy

Jun 22, 2005 at 3:51 AM

Question - I keep hearing 'Kaboose' mentioned in this video. What the hell does it mean?
Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Jun 22, 2005 at 9:06 AM

Oy, I need my dramamine. Sorry, if I missed this in the video, but how do you create the packages? How do you packaged up the components that your app require -- so that the bootstrapper can load & run it.
Mr. Smith

Jun 22, 2005 at 2:56 PM

Pimp Daddy wrote:

Question - I keep hearing 'Kaboose' mentioned in this video. What the hell does it mean?

When the Bootstrapper is done installing all of your application's prereqs, it then installs your application- which we refer to as the caboose since it is the last thing the Bootstrapper touches.

Usually it will be an MSI or clickOnce .application file, but if you use MSBuild to generate your Bootstrapper the caboose could be anything, from a .BAT file to a text file.
staceyw Before C# there was darkness...

Jun 23, 2005 at 3:32 PM

"And this VS bootstrap video looks an aweful lot like URPMI, up2date and yum. Deja-Vu. The kicker is that we've had this type of dependancy filling on linux for a long time and you're just now starting to develop it on windows."

Bud Light, (speaking as someone who started out on ATT System V) who really cares what unix had or has and for how long. I mean you really waste too much gray matter making comments like that. I think that is a great little tool and should really help developers and the users. Lets give people some credit for their hard work instead of making wise cracks all the time.
MikeGoatly I reserve the right to be wrong.

Jun 24, 2005 at 6:29 AM

I didn't realise the lead singer from Weezer worked at Microsoft!
jonm Blah..

Jun 27, 2005 at 11:54 AM

ClickOnce and the Generic boot strapper rocks! I just need one to install the Report Processing libraries. When I embed a Report and deploy the app via clickonce, I get a crash on a system that doesn't have the ReportViewer libraries. The SQL Reporting people tell me it will be a shipping ClickOnce Package at RTM. Otherwise, this is great! In order to do this in the past we would have to use an expensive third party installer (InstallShield, Wise, or others).
ehuna Grand Poo-Bah

Oct 19, 2005 at 1:05 AM

Great feature and great video!

Just one thing: Chris Smith speaks like Todd from www.oddtodd.com.

"So I wake up and get some cooofeee... I then run the booostrapppper....".