Create Windows installer

Question

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on the best way to create an installer for an application that first checked if the correct version of .NET was installed and if it wasn't downloaded and installed it first and then continued on to install my application.

The application itself is quite small so bundling .NET in with the installer is crazy as it would push the size from 5Mb to 250Mb thats why I want it to download first.

Any advice or links to articles about this problem would be great,

Answer 1

You can use Visual Studio Setup project to get done this easily. What you have to do is add required .net framework under "Detect Dependencies". You can give the link to download the .net framework. Here is a good step by step example.

Here is a another example for your case.

Answer 2

Inno Setup is a free tool that's easy to use and that will do it for you, and I think ClickOnce might provide a link also. http://jrsoftware.org