One of the little setup gems unveiled at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference was a setup chainer ...

It has been developed as part of the "Client Profile" initiative and was released to beta last week.  The Client Profile is basically the .NET 3.5 runtime on a diet that brings it down to a 28MB install package - it has been stripped down to just what Microsoft thinks the average .NET 3.5 desktop applications will need.

Now I'm not one to flip over supercalifrajalistic marketing names, but it is very evident this one was named by a techie open source team ;)  The "Client Profile Configuration Designer" is a new setup chainer that can chain together various setups such as EXEs, MSIs, scripts and click once installs into one unified installer.  You don't have to be distributing the .NET runtimes to use the tool.  It has lots of options for add/remove programs, multiple chained installers, install conditions and automatic upload to a website upon build.

Since the tool is in beta, it's not extremely self explanatory so the how-tos linked below are the quickest way to get started.

Please be aware that this software is currently functioning more like an "Alpha Release" - clicking on too many things seems to result in blank attributes being set which bombs out a release build - but not with enough information to locate the misconfiguration.  Think "Open Source Alpha Release" not "Microsoft Public Beta Release".

It is available for download and there are fully screen capped walkthroughs you can use to get familiar with the tool.

Client Profile Configuration Manager How Tos: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

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Topic: Engineers Toolbox, Win7 / Vista, Windows Installer