The Beginning

Deploying applications is essential to the developers. They must run their application alone without their IDE. Only runtime library and application dependencies is needed. Visual Basic 6.0 is a easy and powerful programming toolkit. It has an own application deployment system called Package Deployment Wizard that creates installers written in VB6.

However Package Deployment Wizard has drawbacks:

• The installer created by PDW consists of Three Files (Setup.CAB, SETUP.LST, & SETUP.EXE) which is hassle to distribute. Missing one of those files can cause installation failures.
• Some installers fails to install components and requires to restart the computer.
• It is outdated that can cause problems when install it on a later version of windows.
• It recklessly overwrite the existing system libraries.

Due to this problem, It requires to search alternative application deployment toolkit. Inno Setup is a powerful and easy tool to create installer. The installer created by Inno is compact because the output installer is only a single executable file. There are many Tools for Inno Setup, however there is no such a tool that imports VB6 projects and create installers for them. Instead, they simply translate the SETUP.LST created by Package Deployment Wizard to Inno Script.

This problem was resolved on Inno Setup Toolbar Advanced. This is Visual Basic Toolbar Add-in has the following features:

• Easily deploy Visual Basic 6.0 Applications straight from your VB6 project via Inno Setup.
• Smart and Compact Installer Output.
• Automatically create Inno Script specially for Visual Basic 6.0 Application.
• Ability to deploy VB6 Applicaations on latest windows version.

• Ability to include Microsoft Data Access Components redistributable installer automatically when needed.

• With Smart Safe Installation. A process where the setup does not extract a component or library when the necessary component is exist on a target computer. This will prevent overwriting existing libraries or components on the system that cause software conflicts.

It is the best alternative to Package Deployment Wizard.

System Requirements:
Visual Basic 6.0 IDE
Inno Setup (version 4.0 or higher)