InstallMate 11 released
After more than 10 years since InstallMate 9 was first let loose upon the world, we have released a new major version of our InstallMate installation builder: InstallMate 11. Why did it take so long to come up with a new major version?
A few reasons:
- We felt that InstallMate 9 was a perfectly good tool that did not need major changes. Instead, we concentrated on keeping it up to date with minor improvements to its functionality and regular additions of new prerequisites, such as the .Net and Microsoft Visual C/C++ runtimes.
- We don't believe in releasing new (major) versions just for the sake of generating revenue in the form of upgrade fees. We have always been liberal with upgrades and even with the new InstallMate 11 offer a free upgrade to anyone who purchased its predecessor in the last 24 months, instead of the 12 month period that we guarantee anyway.
What has changed recently is that for the first time, Microsoft seems to have a credible path towards Arrm64-based Windows and corresponding hardware. We felt that we should support this natively, with an Arm64-based installer, rather than rely on the x86/x64 emulation that is part of the Windows Arm64 editions.
As a result we decided to overhaul our codebase, bring it up to date with the latest Microsoft C/C++ compilers, and use the opportunity to modernise the code*, adding support for Arm64 builds at the same time. In the process, we also removed features that were long obsolete, such as conversion of 25+ year old Visual Basic projects and similar outdated technology.
[* Our codebase from ExpertInstall 3 onwards was based on the then-current Microsoft C and C++ compilers, ca. 2005-2008. Unfortunately, in those days Microsoft did not follow the C and C++ standards as well as they do nowadays, with the result that C-based code was effectively stuck at the 1992 level and C++ code around 2003. Thanks to improved Microsoft C and C++ compiler compliance, our new codebase is now up to date with C11 and C++17. We used their new features and syntax improvements for a substantial code clean up, without changing the functionality of the installers.]
Major changes
Apart from the codebase overhaul, we made the following changes compared to InstallMate 9:
- Support for ARM AArch64 (arm64) editions of Windows. As mentioned earlier, this was the main driving force behind the new InstallMate. Both InstallMate Builder (the development environment) and the installers themselves are now available as native Arm64 executables. Of course, we also retained the x86 and x64 versions of each.
- Modest modernisation of the user interface. Let's face it: graphic design is not our forte, so we limited our efforts to removing the boldest colours and toning down the UI to make it blend in better with the current Windows 11 themes.
- Support for the latest .Net 9 prerequisites and Microsoft C/C++ runtimes. Each new .Net generation (Microsoft recently released the first of the .Net 9.x series) requires new prerequisites in InstallMate with their own internal support, so we added that to InstallMate 11 as well.
- Improved New Project wizard that prepares a ready-to-install project. We should probably have done this sooner, but our New Project wizard now lets you specify the main executable of your application and uses that to populate the installer project with (usually) enough files and shortcuts to create a working installer from the word go.
- Dozens of detail improvements and corrections. These happened along the way, while we were overhauling the codebase and testing the new features. They are individually insignificant, but together improve the product in subtle ways.
Upgrading
As always, we offer attractive upgrade prices for users of a previous version of InstallMate or its predecessors, and free upgrades to anyone who purchased an InstallMate 9 licence on or after 1 January 2023.
If you already have InstallMate 9 projects, then upgrading is simply a matter of opening the project in the new InstallMate 11. This will perform the necessary conversions and then save the project with a new .improj file extension, so your existing InstallMate 9 project remains intact.
Upgrading from InstallMate 7 or earlier requires an intermediate step: use InstallMate 9 to convert the project to .im9, then open the converted project in InstallMate 11.
Copyright © 2024 David Adams. All rights reserved. Page last modified on 2024-12-16 08:45
