How to include third party exe in visual studio 2010 setup and deployment project?

Question

Let's say A.exe is the my exe project which runs fine at windows system .

Let's say B.exe is the external third party driver which is required for A.exe . Currently I am installing both projects separately. Now, I want to include the driver into my A.exe installation, s that when the user installs A.exe , B.exe automatically gets installed first.

How should I do that?

Answer 1

See the documentation :

1. From the Project menu, select Add and click File.
2. Find the folder that contains MyApplication.exe and MyLibrary.DLL and select them both.
3. In the File System window, right-click on Application Folder, point to Add and click Create to create a new folder. Call it MyLibrary.
4. Click on Application Folder again, select MyLibrary.DLL and drag it to the MyLibrary folder.In Solution Explorer, under your project in Detect Dependencies you should see that the Visual Studio detects dependencies on MFC90.dll and MSVCR90.dll. You must add the corresponding Merge Modules for these DLLs.
5. From the Project menu, point to Add and click Merge Module. Select Microsoft_VC90_CRT_x86.msm and Microsoft_VC90_MFC_x86.msm, and click OK. For the debug versions of these merge modules, select Microsoft_VC90_DebugCRT_x86.msm and Microsoft_VC90_DebugMFC_x86.msm.

For VS2010 deployent examples take a look here .