InstallShield 2013

It has actually been a while since I last looked at InstallShield (2010 to be exact).  Therefore, when InstallShield 2013 was recently released, I decided to check it out once again to see what changes were introduced.

First, let me provide a few screenshots of what was previously available in InstallShield 2010:

Here is the Installation Designer in InstallShield 2010:

Here is the list of what was available for Custom Actions in InstallShield 2010:

Here is the SQL Scripts view in InstallShield 2010:

Here is a screenshot of what was available for Windows Installer project types in InstallShield 2010:

Below is a screenshot of the new Installation Designer screen in InstallShield 2013:

Some of the new features that have been introduced in InstallShield 2013 since InstallShield 2010 are the following:

1. Support for Windows 2000 has been dropped from the Project Assistant dialog.
2. You can now configure Scheduled Tasks
3. You can now configure Services
4. You have a greater list of available Custom Actions including Kill Process and PowerShell!!
5. You can now open SQL Scripts in SQL Server Management Studio.
6. ApplicationPoolIdentity has been added as an available Process Identity for Application Pools.

There is a new project type called Suite/Advanced UI Project which allows launching multiple installation packages through one consolidated User Interface:

 In the list of available Installation Requirements, you will notice the following options missing:

1. Adobe Reader 11
2. .NET Framework v. 4.5
3. SQL Server 2012 Express
4. Internet Explorer 10 or Internet Explorer 11
5. Microsoft Office 2013

Of course, many of these are available through the Redistributables section, however, it would be convenient if these were also available as Installation Requirements.

Finally, though this feature was also present in InstallShield 2010, there have been some updates to App-V support to allow targeting different versions of App-V for deployment: