How to: Choose Which Advanced Installer Azure DevOps Task You Need?

Nowadays CI/CD(Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) pipeline became a best practice for developers and DevOps helping them to manage the software process in a much easier and automated way.

To improve the software quality and team collaboration, Advanced Installer built two plugins that can be easily integrated into the Azure DevOps pipelines.

• Advanced Installer Build
• Advanced Installer - Tool Installer

As we’ve seen in a previous blog post article, we configured and automated the digital signing process through the Advanced Installer Build Task.

In this article, I would like to present a short comparison between the Advanced Installer Tool Installer and Advanced Installer Build, and a brief guide on how to choose the task that suits your needs the best.

Advanced Installer Build Task

Advanced Installer Build Task is the first plugin we developed for Team Foundation Server for helping Advanced Installer users to create their own custom task and build an Advanced Installer project as part of a pipeline.

In a nutshell, the capabilities of Advanced Installer Build Task are:

• The possibility to download and deploy the Advanced Installer project on a build agent, regardless of the version you use;
• Customization of the AIP project for better integration with the pipeline;
• Build the AIP project directly in the pipeline.

Keep in mind that any modifications made to the Advanced Installer project are available only during the pipeline execution, thus the project file remains unchanged.

To recap, Advanced Installer Build Task is a handy tool for developers who need to build the Advanced Installer setup directly from the repository.

Advanced Installer - Tool Installer Task

Advanced Installer’s Tool Installer Task was originally created to help users when building a solution that contains a Visual Studio Advanced Installer project.

As its name implies, Advanced Installer Task enables you to install a particular Advanced Installer version to later on have the possibility to download it from the internet.

However, since we added the PowerShell support, you can make various configurations to the Advanced Installer project by using PowerShell scripts.

To wrap it wap, both of the Advanced Installer tasks are truly handy when breaking through the Azure DevOps pipelines. Just configure it based on your requirements and needs and you are all set.

Also, don’t forget the plugins are open source on GitHub. Don’t hesitate to leave your comments or critiques there.

• Advanced Installer Build
• Advanced Installer Tool Installer

Happy coding!