Adding Custom Prerequisites to your MSI package

Recently I made an installer for an Outlook 2007 Add-in developed using VSTO/VS 2008 and it worked fine on all development machines I have, but I noticed that it would fail to run on a fresh VPC image.

I had added all the necessary CA permissions, correct registry entries to the installer but I could not figure out what was missing!

A bit of goggling and I found some interesting things that I would share here:

A shared office 2007 add-in would need the following as prerequisites

• .NET Framework
• VSTO Runtime
• Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies

So I decided to go ahead and add them to my installer but to my surprise the VS 2008 prerequisite dialog did not contain any of these. So how do i add them to the prerequisites dialog on my development machine???

It seems gotdotnet hosted such a tool which is now moved to codeplex. I could add all these 3 as a prerequisite and boom! it worked. This tool called the BMG or the Bootstrap Manifest Generator can take up arbitrary executables and MSI packages and add them as custom prerequisites!

A click once version of BMG can be found here.

Here is a nice article describing it.