For Visual Studio 2022 support for Visual Studio Installer Projects must now be installed as an official Microsoft extension from here:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualStudioClient.MicrosoftVisualStudio2022InstallerProjects

I found this by googling "Visual Studio 2022 Installer Project".

The best way is to create a setup package, it can be an MSI, EXE or MSIX. You can do this directly from Visual Studio, without using any third party software.

You can create an MSI or EXE using Microsoft's Installer Project template. This is recommended if you are targeting users running on olders OSes like Windows 7/8, etc... or if your application has deep system integrations, like services, shell menu extensions, etc... or it simply needs to be installed per machine (for all users)

If you are targeting only Windows 10 users (1709 or newer) and your application dos not require administrative APIs (resources like services, shell, etcc or sharing files with other applications) you could use Microsoft's support to build MSIX packages.

Deploying and updating and MSIX is much simpler both for you and for the end-users, but it comes with some limitations, as mentioned above, for security reasons.

Also, MSIX requires all setup packages to be digitally signed. You can use a code signing certificate purchased from a certified vendor or your can generate your own certificate (but this needs to be accepted by the end-user machines, so you need a way to deploy this certificate to their machines before giving them the MSIX. If you are inside an enterprise network, this can be easily done, for home users is not recommended).

If you are interested in MSIX, let me know and I can give you more details about digital signing or other questions you might have.

Short Version: In essence you will need a deployment tool. List view of major deployment tools. Maybe that list view is the easiest overview? (a sense of scope). Much more detail below (and too many links too).

Details: There is some prerequisite functionality available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Installer Projects, but I am unfamiliar with the details. I find this project type inadequate for real deployment work for a lot of reasons (lacking features and some odd implementations). More on this here - a few concrete problems to consider.

Several commercial tools will do this for you with special features to help make it quick(er). I verified that Advanced Installer can do it (and here is a great gateway to all things Advanced Installer. Some free features available). I assume Installshield can do it as well (certainly for other runtimes, didn't verify this particular one). Generally it will be handled by a setup.exe bootstrapper / chainer embedding all runtimes along with your own MSI file(s).

In other tools, you will have to do it yourself, by figuring out command lines and how to handle error conditions. There are some hints here (not tested by me - a google sweep will give you more): https://www.itninja.com/software/microsoft/access-runtime/2016-1

Get more command line info by going accessruntime_4288-1001_x64_en-us.exe /?:

WiX is free and open source - with a relatively hefty learning curve if you don't know MSI, and contains a bootstrapper feature called "Burn". Here is the documentation for: How To: Install the .NET Framework Using Burn (first read the "Building Installation Package Bundles" instructions in "Step 1"). A real-world Burn sample. And some sample source markup.

Some developers recommend the dotnetinstaller bootstrapper. Not something I know much about. It is just a bootstrapper. Runs things in sequence for you.

If you are doing in-house or ad-hoc deployment, even a batch file could do the job I suppose, but if you do that for a real product for large-scale and generalized deployment I would be very worried indeed. If there is one thing we hate as deployment specialists, I'd say it is batch files embedded in packages. Batch files (and scripts) are system administrator tools, not general deployment tools.

Some Older Links:

• Executable files to MSI installer
• How do Installation Software Programs Extract Files?
• Create MSI or setup project with Visual Studio 2012
• How to make an installer that automatically install all the prerequisite programs for the application
• Windows service NOT shown in add remove programs under control panel
• How to make an installer that automatically install all the prerequisite programs for the application
• Wix - How to run/install application without UI

The answer was:

In addition to the changes you made (updating the AssemblyFileVersion and AssemblyVersion properties in the output assembly) you also need to update the version of the setup project.

1. Select the setup project in solution explorer and hit F4 to bring up the properties
2. Increase "Version"
3. Say yes to the dialog that comes up asking if you want to update the Product Code
4. Save and build the setup project again.
   
   This will enable the upgrade scenario.

And this does work. The reason I'm adding it here is that F4 is not listed on the .vdproj context menu so it's effectively undiscoverable.

There's one more quirk: if you're using Git, then it might not automatically check out the deployment project file (.vdproj), so you have to manually edit it (adding a space is enough) and reload the project, and then make the changes, which rewrites the project anyway.

I found that the setup project is an InstallShield Limited Edition project, not a Microsoft setup and deployment project. After installing ILE, I was able to open the project in VS2013 and in VS2015. (It didn't open in VS2017 nor VS2019, and that must be because ILE isn't compatible with those versions.)