Additional Setup in Visual Studio Installer Projects

Question

I am trying to create an installation for my project. I am using MS Access DataBase and for it to work Access DataBase Engine is required. If i download that engine https://

Answer 1

Visual Studio setup projects have a Prerequisites choice in the project's properties. This allows you to choose from a list of standard prerequisites and generate a setup.exe that will install the prerequisites and then install your MSI. The Access Runtime doesn't appear in later versions of setup projects because (I assume) Access 2013 ended mainstream support in 2018. The way to add your own prerequisites to this mechanism was with the Bootstrap Manifest Generator, which is perhaps still available but not well documented:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165429.aspx

Apart from that I'd recommend that you learn how to build a WiX Burn bootstrapper executable that will install the Access Runtime and then install your MSI (which you still build with Visual Studio if you need to). If you do a search for that you'll find this kind of thing:

WiX - Install Prerequisites and 3rd party applications

https://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/cb88b2/installing-prerequisites-using-wix-bootstrapper-project-and/

These will explain how to build the Xml to check whether the Access Runtime is installed and the command to use to install it. This is a much better choice than the Bootstrap Manifest Generator.