Reflections

Marketing in all it's clever glory has attracted consumers both wide and far in purchasing software applications that mightn't have been necessary to accomplish many of your programming tasks. 

Amongst them are the plethora of installer applications that profess to have all the bells whistles, frills and added functionality  within them that allow programmers to create sophisticated installer applications with ease and simplicity.

However, if you have a Windows based machine and use any version of VISUAL STUDIO, you have at your disposal all the arsenal of tools you'll need to create your very own installer application, even without having to install the Visual Studio Installer or third party Installer Plugins.

How so you ask? By using .NET REFLECTION. Yep, that's right... Utilizing .NET REFLECTION techniques in implementing your application installer programming tasks allows programmers to create installer applications as creative and sophisticated as your depth of conceptualization and artistic license can take you. And best of all, you can do so, without having to deal with the hassles involved in working with foreign applications or plugin interfaces.

.Net Reflection methods allow programmers to access classes, interfaces, files and assembly information to utilize data points within them at application runtime.

Let's say you have installer application or cabinet  files to copy on the target client machine you are installing your application on. All you'd have to do is save those files within your application project and viola....file copy method served!

SQL, POWERSHELL and COM file types can also be saved inside an application project and invoked and rendered within the application at runtime, making way for a few interesting application implementations to be created.

So give it a try by copying files from one location to another on your machine from within your visual studio project... and for my developer enthusiast's - give it a go at rendering or invoking application functionality from the files within the application.

You'll find some useful information on Reflection here.