Are Visual Studio Setup projects suitable for complex setups?

Question

Are "Visual Studio Setup" projects suitable for complex setups in different versions?

The application is rather large (> 500,000 lines of code) and is un

Answer 1

No, no, no and no to Visual Studio Deployment projects. I've been there on "large" projects (15,000 files with thousands of merge modules and hundreds of InstallUtil custom actions because VDPROJ exposes almost nothing of the underlying MSI such as creating services). I could go on for hours about how horrible it truly is.

I have a team of four installation developers and we use a mix of WiX and InstallShield. Our typical install has nearly 100 features, 800 merge modules and 15,000 files. We deploy nearly every type of resource you can imagine including chaining third-party installs to create complete products or systems. We are able to do this for over a dozen products each building off of multiple integration, release and maintenance branches. The four of us support an organization of over 400 people with around 250 developers.

We are able to do this because InstallShield actually can give you a fair amount of reuse. You use product configurations and features / merge modules to create encapsulations of groups of files and business logic. Still, WiX does a better job (although much harder to learn and feature holes here and there that we still need InstallShield for), so we have been slowly transitioning our baseline over to WiX where possible.