Good Installation automation?

Hello all,
Recently I've offered to make an automation process occur for a fairly complex piece of software. I need some automation software to do this. The software must be able to compile a standalone exe (not requiring any runtimes or anthing) and the EXE must be compatible with vista, as that's what it will be running on. I need to software to be able to prompt the user for various pieces of information, such as location number, or new or upgrade installation. I also need it to be able to check if a file exists and overwrite files automatically.

Do you have any suggestions? Ultimately I could make a program in C and compile it, but that would require quite a bit of learning on my part as I only know C#.NET and, well, I'd need to ensure the .NET platform was installed if I did that. If I were to use VC++6, then I'd still be looking at a learning curve, but there would be no dependancies from what I understand.

I understand that there are third party scripting programs, but I've yet to be able find any, let alone ensure they do what I need.

I seriously can't imagine why a VB6 program could not meet all of these requirements. Vista includes all of the base runtime components in their most recent forms, as well as a number of VB6's "extended runtime" components - right out of the box.

The ability to use registration-free COM makes it easy to include most additional components that might be required. These would be separate files but they don't require registration or formal installation. XCopy deployment (for example from a self-extracting archive) works just fine.

Support Statement for Visual Basic 6.0 on Windows®Vista™and Windows®Server 2008™ even lists what ships as part of Vista and what must be deployed by you if required.

From your problem description I doubt you'd even need to rely on the extended runtime, but those pieces are already in place.


For that matter Vista ships with the .Net 3.0 Framework installed, unlike prior OSs.

True. I just wanted to make sure that M$ wouldn't go and change things later on in the future. I thought of making it in VB6, but wanted to be sure it wouldn't go and change on me like the industry likes to do.