I was developing an application that eventually was going to be configured as a windows service. Several instances of this application can be run on a single server. So right now we just create several folders with the application binaries and manually configure dedicated windows services. The task that I was given now is to create an installer that would help us to do exactly this thing. We used to use MSI (Wix) for other applications but there were no requirements to set up multiple instances.

Here’re requirements to the installer:

• Multiple instances of the same app can be installed on the same server
• Installed instances should be updatable with the next version via the installer
• Installer is free (preferably)

There’s another idea that I don’t know how to bring to life (if it’s possible at all). Instead of performing multiple installations I could allow to select number of instances of the application to install. This would require some dynamic logic baked into the installer. I was thinking of features but they are pretty much static and honestly speaking I can’t see how single app can be copied to their own folders with some minor tweaks to configuration file for each of them.

Did someone accomplished similar task in the past? Looking for any ideas and/or suggestions on tools.

I read up on the multiple product installations via MSI and came to conclusion that it might be very tricky to do it as we’ll need to deal with transforms and product code which somehow needs to be changed in runtime for every single installation. It’s not ideal.