2024 - At Microsoft its still not clear for the people that who is using Visual Studio might want to create an installer for the application he's building.

Why would people want an installer, what a crazy thought to have it in the ide primarily used for building applications.

i mean to be fair, installers slowly but surely are getting out of fashion, while being replaced by packaging solutions used in app stores and launchers.

@thebiochemic "going out of fashion" 95% of software still installed with installer...

@blindXfish .. on Windows Desktop.

And even there, you have something like Steam, where everything is run via their setup system, the microsoft store, where stuff is just packaged to be run in-store.
MacOS with their stores (and homebrew), a few installers maybe.
Linux, Android & iOS, that run almost exclusively via different Package Manager and App Store solutions.

So yeah... definitely not 95%. Not even close.

Still no excuse. Have you seen the amount of useless tools the IDE is packed with by default? I am 100% sure that more people use the installer than the "Dev tunels" or the "Ribbon editor"

@blindXfish yeah i agree on that one. Visual studio is a bloated PoS.

At least they found time to change the button to expand/collapse code blocks from a +/- sign to a little caret thing.

And change the shortcut to rename an identifier from F2 to Ctrl+R Ctrl+R.

And change the menu titles from initial caps to all caps and back again.

And make clicky-draggy editors for sql scripts and github actions.

And that thing that helpfully adds random using directives when you mistype something.

@thebiochemic I avoid store apps like the plague. Exception: Steam. I want nothing to do with Microsoft Store.

I agree with @thebiochemic that installers get out of fashion but you are still right, it is completely idiotic that you need to reach out for 3rd party solutions if you want (or need) to make software for Windows which has an installer.