Installer Profile - NSIS

NSIS or the nullsoft scriptable installer system is a great little installer. As it's name points out, it is scriptable and has as much functionality as any installer program you can imagine. How does it rate for AutoCAD? Great!

Since a lot of custom AutoCAD or Inventor applications are small scripts in and of themselves, NSIS lends a lot of speed to a quick little app that needs to be deployed. Why? Well, first and foremost, the scripts can be edited right in notepad. They can easily be reused, allowing you to create a template script and modify it as needed. Other third parties have also created NSIS editors that have build in wizards!

Ok, so just how powerful is NSIS when it comes to deploying to AutoCAD or Inventor? Here are a few examples:

Registry reading and writing - so you can set up your application to demand load. You can also work out a script that enumerates all installed version of AutoCAD and allows the user to select.

Full dialog editing and creating. So you can create a dialog with said enumerated versions of AutoCAD

It's free!

It has a library of scripts and examples on the homepage

Simple and easy to use

Ok, now that I have drooled all over NSIS, what is wrong with it? Well, sometimes the scriping can get a little cumbersome. Especially when trying to enumerate values from the registry or do anything more than just a simple file copy type installer. While not impossible to create these things, sometimes, a nice wizard or GUI would be very helpful.

In the end, NSIS is a great tool to have! If you find yourself deploying a lot of applications to AutoCAD or Inventor and they are all simple file copy type deployments, NSIS is priceless! Especially if you create a few templates to modify!