Add-in installer

[mattpalermo]

An automated installer for the add-in would really help those who are too lazy to install their add-in 😊 .
Issue #27 may be a good first step before achieving this.

From my experience with setting up an installer for EffOff it can be a bit of a headache. The Inno installer or the WiX installer may provide good solutions for this. The NSIS installer scripts seem very verbose, but it seems to be popular on alternativeTo.net.

Or is there a better way to distribute excel add-ins?

[spences10]

Chocolatey 😎

Let me have a play around with this today, see if I can come up with something

[mattpalermo]

Notes from the other day:
When trying to get EffOff to install on @spences10's work machine, the WiX installer failed at the task. The Inno installer managed perfectly.

[spences10]

I tried on another machine with the effoff VBA-IDE-Code-Export.xlsm command and got the following output

Unhandled Exception: System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: path
   at System.IO.File.ReadAllText(String path)
   at effoff.effoff.Main(String[] args) in C:\Users\Matthew Palermo\dev\effoff\effoff.cs:line 51

[mattpalermo]

@spences10 this is simply a bug with EffOff. It has to do with the fact that it wants there to be a "CustomUI" property in the CodeExport.config.json file.

[spences10]

Just fyi I found this: https://github.com/rubberduck203/VBEX/blob/master/Make.ps1

Again, there's some assumptions here #1 being that you should be admin on your machine to run it, this isn't an option for some users.

I'm not saying CodeExport is a breeze to set up but the instructions are such that you are walked through setup. If the PowerShell script fails for this you are left to pick through the ps1 script for the references.

[mattpalermo]

Nice find! This seems like a good example of using development scripts for VBA.

I'm not sure about using a ps script for end user installation. An installer exe seems much more user friendly.