Avoiding bootstrapper manifest dependency in Visual Studio Setup project
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I have a Setup project in Visual Studio 2010.

This has a "Prerequisites" section which allows you to select packages that must be installed along with yours. I've selected SQL Server Compact 4.0.

![prerequisites form][1]

Apparently the items shown in this dialog are read from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages". This contains a bunch of "bootstrapper manifest packages" which differ from machine to machine, depending on what you've installed and in what order.

**The problem:** once you've selected one of these prereqs, the corresponding bootstrapper packages must exist in that folder build properly. It isn't copied to your setup project when selected. This creates an external dependency to a hardcoded path that may or may not contain the required files on a given machine.

In other words, in order for anyone to build this setup project, they can't just check out the source and build. They must first copy a folder to `C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\...`. Is there a way to avoid this external dependency and move it into my project's files?

  [1]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/TRMAs.png