Last updated on August 8, 2021 by
Dave Bird, Posted to developer tools
Autorun is a standard feature of the Microsoft Windows. The Autorun feature detects
when a CD is inserted into the CD-ROM drive and runs an application based on the
contents of the autorun.inf file located on the CD.
Do you wish to impress your customers with professionally designed menu that provide
information about CD, show user manuals and help user to install software?
Typically, this requires programming skills or the use of specialized software with
the visual menu designer. Too complicated? Why not create a nice menu of plain
HTML pages? If you already have a website, you can create menus in just a few clicks.
If you do not have a website, you can find a nice free template and fill it with his
information in any editor, even Notepad.
You can download most recent version of SiteInFile
compiler from our site.
2Create the working directory
Place the pages and files in this directory. HTML pages should use only relative links to images and files.
3Create new project
Run the compiler and click the "New" button to create a new project. Wizard will
appear and you asks you to specify a home page for a project. Open dialog and choose
index.html in the working directory.
4Select output format
At the next step the wizard asks you to specify the format, select the EXE-format
for creating executable. Also specify the file name and choose an icon for it.
5Choose the properties of main window
We choose the parameters of the main window. Depending on the design of HTML pages
you can choose a fixed size or allow users to resize the window.
6Turn on/off menu features
Now you can customize the appearance, enable or disable the display of menus, toolbars,
status bar, shortcut menu and its individual items. If you want to protect menu content
from copying then disable "Print and "Copy to clipboard" items.
7Enable EXE file protection
This step can be skipped, because the password protection and expiration date used for
creating eBooks
8Exclude files from compilation
This is very important. The autorum menu should only contain text and graphics.
It makes no sense to compile installers and manuals into one large EXE file. In this
case, you will need to recompile menu each time you make changes. It is much more
convenient to store frequently updated data separately on the disk. Therefore, in
the "Direct Execution" proves what types of files should not be compile.
Most often it is *.exe; *.dll; *.pdf; *.txt; *.rtf; *.doc;
9Select compression level
The level of compression determines the speed of running the application,
so you can limited to Normal.
10Build it now!
You're done! You can compile and run your autorun menu.
11Prepare autorun.inf
Create autorun.inf file in text editor with two strings:
[autorun]
shellexecute= {name of your compiled file here}
Place this file to the working directory.
12Burn files on CD/DVD disk
Now you can remove all html pages and images from working directory and burn files
on CD or DVD.
