Building a smart installer app, looking for initial reading, where to start.

Our Project has produced around forty or so applications based on VB6, .Net 1.1 and now .Net 2.0 - the problem is now one of user experience, and we would like to bring these little tools under a common installation environment.

This installer would need to check for installed .net framework versions, then download and install them as needed, install and register our legacy activex control.

It would need to be able to interrogate the local network to find out whether the network already has our configuration and management server app installed, and if not provide this as an option to the user... the user would then need a friendly list of applications to choose from, which the installer would pull from our download site and install.

Ideally, we'd like to pull an xML file from the project website and use this as the installation list, with versions/requirements/download path etc.

This looks to be far beyond what I can do with an setup/deployment project in VS2005 - so I'm looking at a windows form app instead, however, I'm struggling to see how to invoke the setup process from within a "regular" app.

What's the best palce to start on something like this my MSDN searching is coming up blank, so I'd appreciate any pointers to good places to start reading/ sample code etc.

Thanks.

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Building a smart installer app, looking for initial reading, where to start.

speeddensity
You can launch installers using the Windows Installer Object Model http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp url=/library/en-us/msi/setup/windows_installer_object_model.asp You can also use this API to query for the install state of other MSI's or Windows Installer Components.
arrmgr
Two Hundred and Twenty Two views, and not a single reply surely someone has some input here I'm not even asking for a solution, just pointers for further study.
Building a smart installer app, looking for initial reading, where to start.

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