Install Matlab MCR as part of the C# Installer Wizard

6
votes

I have wrote a program HelloApp with Matlab and packaged it as .NET Assembly using deploytool as described here. As a result I have got helloapp.dll library, which I included into my Visual Studio 2015 as a reference, so I can run Matlab methods directly from C#. To run the code without Matlab installed, the end user needs Matlab Runtime (MCR) installed at least.

Now I want to create an installer for my C# program. I have came across Visual Studio 2015 Installer Projects which provides some tools to create program setup wizard. The problem is, I don't know how to include download and setup of MCR package as a step in installation process to ensure the user has all the required prerequisites in order for program to run.

1
c#matlabvisual-studioinstallationwindows-installer
Is it necessary to install MCR always or should the setup check if the corresponding Matlab installation exists and skip the installation if the right version is already installed? To my knowledge you need MCR or MATLAB in the right version. – Daniel

1 Answers

3
votes

Well this is not really an answer, but comment area in question was too short ...

I don't know much about VS2015 Installer as I personnally use innosetup. Anyway to check if runtime is installed on target machine you can look if following key exists in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MathWorks\MATLAB Runtime\9.0

See my posts here and here for further details.

NB1: Note that installer for Matlab runtime is very large (about 1 GB). I would not package it with application to deploy, but just warn the user to install it separately.

NB2: I think Mathworks is packaging C:\Program Files\MATLAB\R2015b\toolbox\compiler\deploy\win64\InstallAgent.zip (~66MB) rather than MCRInstall.exe (~1GB) when deploying standalone installer with deploytool for downloading the runtime during install but I don't know how it works.