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

Don't go there!! We thought it was feasible for a few simple installers but it has turned out to be a nightmare... At a first glance the VS setup projects look ok, but soon you'll realize the various deficiencies - meaning that you'll write a bunch of custom action code for accomplishing just the simplest tasks (e.g., service handling and installation into well-defined special directories that are just not accessible from the "nice" setup project GUI).

You can only use some very basic forms to get user input (password input is for instance not possible). There is no automatic incrementing of installer version numbers. The file handling is horrible - you manually have to pick each and every file. That is, you cannot just say "install all files in this directory into that directory" - fantastic task to sit and manually scan for new files in a directory with hundreds of files.

No, go for WiX, although the learning curve might seem slightly worse than for the VS installers - but I have regretted it many times that we didn't do that.