PreNIS

Author: Joe Cincotta (talk, contrib)

PreNIS PreProcessor for NSIS

PreNIS Project Page

At Pixolüt we have been developing apps using .Net for a while. We generally use NSIS for packaging every kind of release. We found that we can reliably deploy server-based applications using NSIS too which can be a real time saver over silly and unreliable ftp deployment.

The real problem with server based deployments (and some normal apps too) is that the application contains hundreds of dependant files in many subdirectories and tracking which files are active and which are no longer in the project is a massive waste of time duplicating what is essentially already in the .Net project file.

Another thing which can be annoying when developing applications is updating version numbers between the assembly.cs and the NSIS script.

Wouldn't it be great to be able to use the .Net project files to dynamically create the NSI file whilst having all the power and features of NSIS? Well, with PreNIS you can. PreNIS provides a simple set of macro tags which will expand out and repeat for all folders or files specified and create a new NSI file which contains all correct files in the project. There are also commands for inserting version information and other things in the final NSIS script.

Read the docs on the home page for more info. Presently only VS2003 with C# or VB.Net is supported. It is a simple extensible platform, contributors to support extending to other languages and VS2005 would be appreciated.

Update: PreNIS is now on SourceForge with all source code in SVN. See link below.

Update: PreNIS now has its own Knowledge Base. Contributions from use in the field is always welcome.

See also

• Pixolüt Industries Website
• PreNIS Project Page
• PreNIS Source Forge Project