My project has various prerequisites for it to run and the install location is set to download from the vendor's web site. Unfortunately, the option to specify the location of the prerequisites affects all of them and you can't choose per prerequisite:
In BMG you can set the download URL of your prerequisite file by setting the "HomeSite URL" property:
I intentionally left mine blank as I wasn't sure if the download location would change frequently or not. When I built my project, I got a build warning:
Putting a "HomeSite URL" will exclude your prerequisite file from your setup package. Instead your bootstrapper will depend on the URL to download the prerequisite. If you put an invalid location, you'll get an error:
As I mentioned before, I wasn't sure how often the links get updated and this was why I chose to include my prerequisite with my setup package.
If you're using a build server like our team is, make sure to copy your prerequisite package to your build server. The default location for Visual Studio 2008's packages is "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages" Be sure to update your "tfsbuild.proj" file to take into account any copying of your prerequisite as well.
Overall, BMG is a great tool with some quirks and bugs. Even with the issues I ran into, I'll still be using this utility to create any prerequisite packages that I might need.
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