Create a Windows Installer

For the TrafficCam Viewer application, I created an installer using NSIS, a great free installer.

NSIS is script-based, and has its own flavor of scripting language.  This makes it a little more painful to learn at first.  However, there are many example scripts out there, and I find this is the best way to learn.  Here's a list of some examples:

• In the NSIS install directory under 'examples'
• http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Category:Code_Examples
• My installer script for TrafficCam Viewer v1.50 (it's a text file with a .nsi extension)

There are several interesting features of my installer script, including a check to see if Java is installed, an approach for detecting a previous install and overwriting it gracefully without losing saved files, the creation of an uninstaller and Start Menu items, reading and writing registry values, file path parsing and manipulation, the use of macros and functions, running external applications as part of the install, and more.  See my installer script for these examples.