Anyone know a suitable freeware/shareware/Not a few grand a pop utility for writing MSI files?
If not then a decent tutorial would be cool, its not like it would be re-written on a weekly basis so hand coding would do.
Do you want to write them from scratch or do you want to repackage existing programs for distribution?
Repackaging existing software. The place im working has nobody who can do it, and nobody interested in learninghow to. Ive never had to do it myself, hence the reason im looking for a tutorial or similar. The software is all already located on a server, but thats as far as they managed to get. At the moment its a physical visit, log in, map drive, install then log out after testing.
Does this help ?
http://www.installsite.org/pages/en/msi/authoring.htm
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/howto/winstall.mspx
Well, a copy of WininstallLE should be all you need assuming the software in question doesnt already have an MSI. That costs about $90 I think. All that does is take a snapshot of the machine before you install a piece of software, takes a snapshot afterwards and generates an MSI with the differences. Its not perfect but it works for the most part.
See if you can find a copy of Wise Install Tailor too, that used to be a free utility which could create MST files for you, that will help avoid repacking most MSI based stuff.