Inno Setup is a free, feature-packed installation builder. The application’s features include a Windows 2000-style wizard interface; the ability to create a single EXE for easy, online distribution; support for disk spanning; and full uninstall capabilities. InnoSetup is not a tool for users looking for a GUI-based simple setup creator, it is more addressing those developers that want to have full control over their setup routine and are not shy of working with a text based configuration file.

InnoSetup was originally released in 1997 and has developed immensly since then. It surely beats many commercial contenders in this area and has proven to be very capable and stabil. InnoSetup’s GUI is basically an editor/compiler for the configuration file that contains all your settings for the setup routine you are creating. The text file format is very similar to that of an INI file and thus less cumbersome to work with than with an XML file like in Ghost Installer Free. The help file is excellent and well structured and makes it much easier to learn about the available settings. The edtor supports color coding, making it more convenient to work with. I don’t think I have to list all the features of a professional setup project but I did not find anything yet that InnoSetup wouldn’t be able to support. Source files, target files, shortcuts, dialogs, license acceptance, signed uninstaller, custom forms and much more. I have used it for several projects over the last years with great success (and no costs). If you like a GUI for this excellent compiler you can find several third party add-ons for that on InnoSetups home page as well.

Key features include:
* Support for all 32-bit Windows versions
* Single EXE installer or disk spanning
* Standard wizard interface, including latest Windows 2000/XP style
* Customisable setup types; e.g. Full, Minimal, Custom
* Complete uninstall capabilities
* Zip, bzip2 and LZMA (7-Zip) compression
* Compare file version info, replace in-use files & shared file counting
* Register DLLs, OCXs and type libraries
* Install fonts
* Create shortcuts anywhere; including Desktop and Quick Start
* Create registry and .INI entries
* Create multi-lingual installers
* Silent install and uninstall
* Run other programs or Pascal scripts during install
* COM Automation support
* Third-party extensions
* Full source code available (Delphi 2 – 5)
* Free of charge, even when deploying commercial applications

One of Inno Setup’s strengths is the healthy community of third-party extensions. These include tools like iwz2iss that converts InstallShield projects into Inno Setup scripts and InnoScript that does the same for Visual Basic projects. Translator is a tool that simplifies the process of creating localised installers. There is also a script pre-processor.

The most useful extension is probably ISTool by Bjørnar Henden, a GUI front-end for creating and editing Inno Setup scripts. It gives easy access to all the sections of a script with custom dialogs for editing the items. These dialogs contain fields for all the possible parameters with check boxes for any possible flags. ISTool has full drag and drop support; you can drag files from Explorer and drop them on a directory in the [Files] section. It can also import Visual Basic and InstallShield projects and simplifies the process of creating localised versions.