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Before I went and ask it here, I came up and have red the contents of the links below:

http://superuser.com/questions/69751/

http://superuser.com/questions/168810/automate-installation-of-your-softwares

And came up with:

And a few which I found by browsing:

But none of them does what I need, since they only automate the installation of popular applications.

But What I want is an application where you can choose to install any software. For example, I want to install visual studio or Netbeans, or Dreamweaver. I'll just have to select the setup file for that application. Then the application will have to do the rest.

Maybe, the application can work by recording key strokes and mouse clicks. Then applying those records to customize the installation. If the installer is complex enough.

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+1, I was wondering the same thing. Theoretically it shouldn't be that hard of a program to write, but I must be wrong because there's nothing like this out there (that I know of). – Sasha Chedygov Aug 1 '10 at 23:31
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@musicfreak: Actually I think such a program would be very hard to write. – Josh Aug 2 '10 at 1:40
@Josh: Never mind, I guess each installer works differently. I don't know what I was thinking. – Sasha Chedygov Aug 2 '10 at 3:57
It's been a month since the question was asked, if one of the answers fits please accept it, otherwise please explain why the answer does not fit. Thanks. – Josh Aug 31 '10 at 13:30
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3 Answers

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There's even a whole language to automate actions in GUI. It's called TCL.

Ninite probably uses .NET framework to do this.

Anyway I googled few software for this, some commercials and some are not: SilkTest, TestComplete, AutoIT

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up vote 1 down vote

Managing the installation and removal of programs that haven't been packaged in some way would be a nightmare, perhaps impossible. I doubt that there's anything out there that can do this. Windows does have it's own package management in place, but it's not as strong as some of the open-source alternatives that you've mentioned.

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up vote 0 down vote

I agree with Josh, your going into a world of pain that in the end IMHO will not be worth it, if your only doing this for a home setup.

Think of the time you will spend trying to make the installation work and then the automatic configurations of your programs... then the a mount of time you will need to adjust it because this OS patch or that program version changed the installation enough for the script not to work... and you will quickly understand that this point is moot.

I do suggest getting to know autoIT regardless, as its a really good windows scripting language.

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