

January 26, 2008

Development Tools Diversity

I'm curious as to the ecosystem diversity of my readers so please take the new poll over on the right.

I'm interested in truthfulness here please! You may select as many as you like, but I ask that each one you select be truely represented as a tool you use to ship a production install. If you've only played with a tool but don't otherwise ship product with it, please don't select it.


Anonymous said...

Windows Installer XLM ??

And where's "Other" ?

Christopher Painter said...

I'm glad you asked. Tell me what you would add and I'll add it to the list of choices. I was going to put Stefan Krueger's entire list but it looked rather long and I only wanted to add a tool if it had a reasonible expectation of being voted for.

Anonymous said...


I think that there is a "mess" in the voting numbers. [The percentages don't sum to 100%]

Christopher Painter said...

I didn't write the AddIn ( Google did ) but I'm guessing that it's `correct`. It adds up to 150% ( atleast right now it does ) so I'm guessing that means on average people select 1 1/2 tools.

Anonymous said...

The percentage indicates which fraction of all voters are using the particualr tool. For example, there are currently 34 votes. 12 of 34 (= 35%) selected SDK, 5 of 34 (= 14%) selected VS, etc.

I expect a significant overap in the following areas:
- Many people will use Orca, in addition to some real authoring tool, so they also vote for SDK.
- Many WiX users will use it's Visual Studio intergration, so they might vote for both. Other tools also provide Visual Studio integration.

I agree that there should be an option "other tool", and maybe also an option for repackaging tools.

Christopher Painter said...

Sorry, I was wrong. Once someone voted, the poll choices became frozen.

Christopher Painter said...

I'm closing the poll. Here is the final breakdown:

InstallShield 57%
Windows Installer XLM 22%
Windows Installer SDK/Other Home Grown 17%
Microsoft Visual Studio 13%
Wise 11%
InstallAware / WiXAware 7%
Advanced Installer 6%
Setup Factory for Windows Installer 4%
Tarma ExpertInstall 2%