It is often taken for granted that everyone knows what a setup is, what it consists of, and how it is organized. If this is your first experience with creating setups, you will definitely want to read our overview of setups. If you are an experienced setup designer, but are unfamiliar with the Windows Installer service, you may want to read about the differences between traditional setups and setups created for Windows Installer. Getting started with a strong base is important in almost any venture. The same applies to creating setups. The organization of your setup will be continually built upon while your installation is being developed. Creating features and providing general information about your setup will give you the base that you can build upon later in the setup creation process. The main purpose of most setups is to transfer files from the source medium to the target machine. The files you would like to have installed on a target machine must first be added to your setup project. InstallShield offers you various ways to add files to your setup from a Windows Explorer style, drag-and-drop view to dependency scanners that can automatically add needed files to your setup. Most setups don't stop at mere file transfer. They create shortcuts, edit the registry, and make changes to .ini files. In essence, these type of actions allow you to configure the target system to your needs. The user interface of your setup often creates the first impression your customers have of your product. To ensure that this impression is a good one, you can create dialogs perfect for your needs. In addition, you can include billboards in your setup to inform or entertain your customers during the setup process.The user interface of your setup and the text displayed by it often create the first impression your customers have of your product. To ensure that this impression is a good one, you can choose which dialogs you would like to display, customize the look of the dialogs, and edit any of the text that is displayed. In addition, you can include billboards in your setup to inform or entertain your customers during the setup process. Once you have decided which elements to place in setup, you can control their order and occurrence. Determining the dialogs and actions in the setup is chiefly a matter of modifying the Windows Installer “sequences” to control the timeline on which those actions execute. To extend the functionality built into Windows Installer, you can author custom actions to launch an executable, call a function in a DLL, or process InstallScript, JScript, or VBScript. Insert the custom action into a sequence as you would a built-in action or dialog.If your application has certain hardware or software requirements that must be met in order to run properly, you can insure that the setup will not run on systems that don't meet these requirements. Additionally, you can use custom actions to perform tasks that are not natively supported by the Windows Installer service, such as calling a function from a DLL or launching an executable file. The final step in creating your setup involves building it into a usable package, testing it, and then distributing it to a target destination. All of these tasks can be accomplished within InstallShield.