We added a new feature to my current project that required a third party application as a prerequisite. Hooking this into Visual Studio seemed pretty straight forward; just use a bootstrapping program to create the necessary bootstrap package for Visual Studio. You can also create your own manually.
I used Bootstrapper Manifest Generator to generate my bootstrap package. Although this application was quite buggy for me, in the end it got the job done. However, it wasn't as easy as it should have been to get the whole process going.
The current version of BMG for Visual Studio 2008 is still in beta, so that may account for the numerous bugs I encountered when running this application. I also had some issues figuring out how to get things to work the way I wanted. For instance, if you want a progress bar for your prerequisite's installation, you'll need to put in an installation time:
If you don't put a time (which is just a guess anyway), you'll end up with a screen like this:
The prerequisite will install, but you'll have no progress bar. Not a show stopper, but I found this to be unappealing. Also, if you overshoot your installation time, the progress bar will never reach the end before exiting this screen. If you undershoot it, the progress bar will go to the end and start over. I chose the latter.
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