Make installer that can run silently

Hi Guys,

I've got a .NET 2.0 project that I need to deploy to several hundred PCs at work - I was planning to just use 'xcopy' style deployment, i.e just copying the EXE to each PC, however I now need to have a few registry keys created and a couple of other things that mean using an installer would be the ideal way to do things. So ideally I would like to deploy this via group policy to all of the machines but to be able to do that the install needs to be able to run silently without any user interaction being required... does anyone know if/how I can achieve this using the Visual Studio setup projects?

I know when you build a setup project you get an MSI file which contains the core program parts and a Setup.exe that is basically just a prerequisite checker/installer and I think its quite easy to run the MSI silently but the problem is I need to run the prerequisite installer as well so that it installs .NET framework 2.0 if it is not already on the users machine..

Thanks
Chris