Thursday, February 3, 2005 - Thu, 3 Feb 2005

The next thing to finish off is the Setup and Uninstall programs. This was something I had initially set up, pretty well to my satisfaction some time back. I go to look at that directory and - Wow! - it was back in November 2000 that I had done it.

At that time I picked a program called Inno Setup to do this. Then it was in version 1.3.21. Jordan Russell, the author of Inno Setup, has been constantly improving it since then and it is now at version 5.0.7. Today, it is still the program I would pick. I downloaded and installed the new version.

The next thing I always do when I start to work with a program that I need is to print out most of its documentation and put it in a binder. For learning purposes, I still find it easier to scan through documentation in a comfortable couch than sitting at the computer.

Amazingly, many of the commands are still the same from the 1.3.21 version. Jordan did a great job in retaining backwards compatibility. Very quickly, I was able get a simple install and uninstall working. I notice that they’ve implemented compression, and my current Behold executable and help file that is now sitting at about 2.3 MB in size compresses down to about 1.0 MB - which is very small compared to the majority of other programs out there. It is amazing how efficient the Delphi programming language is, at both execution speed and small size of the executable.