Why Use a Third Party Installer
Given that ToolBook has an inbuilt tool to package your 'native' applications why on earth would you want to go out and spend yet more money on a third party installer, particularly when there are several good installers around that are absolutely free. Well to answer you, nothing says more about your product than the application routine that installs it. Time spent getting your installation right is time well spent and to be perfectly frank the autopackager, in my opinion at least, simply isn't up to the mark.
The advent of Windows Vista also meant that as developers we were going to have to look at new installers, specifically new Windows Installers that met all of the new demands that were being placed on us. my previous choice did not look as if it was going to do the job and increasing forays into the world of .net meant that anything I went for by way of an installer was going to have to be a fully compatible Windows Installer and work with that as well. I was going to need something that was relatively easy to use (purely script based installers are not my forte) and reasonably priced. The two well known market leaders do not in my opinion fall into that category. I'm deliberately not naming names here (other than that of the installer I finally settled on) simply because all developers have their favorites and to a certain extent my personal preference is just that, a personal preference. I did however download and trial nearly a dozen different installers. Some were completely free, others offered a 'lite' version that was free with more feature rich versions coming at a price. My main criteria were ease of use, good support and an upgrade path that did not cost the earth. My eventual choice; Advanced Installer by Caphyon.
Installing ToolBook Applications
For those of you familiar with installing ToolBook Native applications prior to version 9.0 it could be argued that your main choice boiled down to whether or not you opted to install the runtime properly (ie in the Common Files section of Program Files) or cheat and bundle everything together in the one directory. The ToolBook help files contained a helpful list of those files that you needed to package as well as your own application files and it really could be a simple as just bundling them altogether into a directory of your choosing.
Version 9.0 and ToolBook's move into the brave new world of 32bit (albeit a little later than most other pieces of software) meant that that simple approach was not really going to meet with approval any longer. Installs were going to have to get the runtime placed properly into the Common Files directory and certain ini files were going to need to be written or amended as the case may be. The help files were no longer as forthcoming about what you needed to do either. Checking the knowledge base on the ToolBook website we now find the following suggestion.
"To install ToolBook properly onto an end-user machine, more needs to be done than simply installing some files. There are registry entries to create, and INI files to update, and only ToolBook would know how to do all of this correctly. ... and it is recommended that you use the Neuron.exe installer if you want to install ToolBook's runtime engine onto an end user machine. "
To successfully make a third party installation that follows ToolBook guidelines we are going to have to use the neuron installer. The article that follows will guide you through the process of doing just that using Advanced Installer.