Modularizing Installation Projects to Distribute Development Work and Enable Reuse

InstallShield 2018

The developer installation manifest (DIM) support in InstallShield is targeted toward engineering teams who want to foster collaboration, enable distributed installation development, and maximize efficiency in their organizations. A DIM is a feature-sized collection of related items such as product files, shortcuts, registry entries, text file changes, IIS Web sites, and other elements that together make up a discrete, logically separated portion of a product installation. Some benefits of using DIMs are as follows:

Working with DIMs enables multiple team members to contribute to the development of the installation simultaneously. Each software developer or other team member can work on a separate DIM that the release engineer can reference in one or more installation projects.
Release engineers can reuse DIMs in multiple installation projects, enabling efficiency.
DIMs include support for virtually the same functionality that is available in Basic MSI projects. This gives authors of DIMs all of the flexibility that they need to develop their portions of an installation.

This section of the documentation explains how to work with a DIM project in InstallShield.

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