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dotSetup

An open source Windows installer that works.

dotSetup is a free and open source installer for Windows programs. It is built to be a modern alternative to older installers often not optimized for the latest Windows OS versions. dotSetup is designed to be as small and flexible as possible and is therefore very suitable for internet distribution. dotSetup is written in .NET and available under the GPLv3 license.

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dotSetup has taken a unique approach and is available as both a complete standalone installer or a library. This approach allows ease of use on one hand and at the same time flexibility for having solutions to any real-life scenarios. The standalone installer is powerful enough to take care of the majority of installation flows, however if some features are missing it is always possible to alter the source code of the standalone installer or develop a completely new solution using the dotSetup library. The code is written in C# and the development is fairly easy using Microsoft Visual Studio.

64-bit support
Supports both 32-bit and 64-bit applications
Legacy Windows OS
Windows XP SP2 and higher support
Non-administrative installations
Support for administrative/non-administrative installations
Uninstall
Complete Uninstall handling
Compression
Built-in compression support
Generic and Custom UI
Customizable and Standard Windows wizard interface
Silent Install
Silent install and uninstall
Unicode
Full Unicode support
Tiny footprint
Tiny footprint both in binary size and memory usage
BITS
Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service for uninterrupted download

In addition, dotSetup can:

  • Ability to register DLL’s/OCX’s
  • Creation of shortcuts everywhere
  • Execution of other processes during various installation stages
  • Reading and writing to Windows Registry
  • Requires .NET Version 4.0 and up

If you’ve added some new cool features to the installer and feel like sharing it’s also very easy – just open a pull request at our github account. dotSetup is a true open source and created by (and for) developers like you.