Step-by-step instructions to create a Media Center application setup package in Visual Studio

Anthony Park has been working on a Windows Vista version of his MCEBrowser application. As part of this process, he has posted a set of step-by-step instructions that can be used to create a setup package for a Windows Media Center hosted HTML application using Visual Studio.

The techniques described in this blog post are roughly the same to what we will be documenting in the Windows Media Center SDK for Windows Vista. If you are working on a Windows Media Center application, I encourage you to take a look at these instructions if you plan on using Visual Studio to create your setup package.

One thing that Anthony does not mention is how to detect versions of the .NET Framework. If you are planning to include .NET Framework version checking in your Visual Studio setup/deployment project, please take a look at this blog post for suggestions to make your setup package more flexible and support multiple versions of the .NET Framework.

If you are developing Windows Media Center applications, I would also like to encourage you to take a look at the article I previously published that describes how to create a setup package for a Windows Media Center application using the WiX toolset. There is a bit steeper learning curve to get started with WiX when compared to the Visual Studio setup/deployment project, but I find WiX much more powerful and easier to work with, plus it builds cleaner setup packages that can be more reliably serviced after they have been shipped.