Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: WiX Resources

I jumped on to the WiX bandwagon yesterday and wanted to capture some resources that helped me up the learning curve.

All in all, I’m digging WiX. It takes a bit to wrap your head around it (as I’m coming from Setup Project world and Wise beyond that) but it has a nice logical flow to it. I’m now on the edge of seeing beyond the XML and instead, the blond, redhead, brunet… ;)

I am looking forward to a designer, but even without one, I think we’re going to be moving our current Sprinting project to it. Two of us have churned for two days trying to resolve an issue were our Setup Project would build the MSI, but still report 1 failure (even with MSBuild output set to diagnostic there’s no information about the “failed” task. All Projects in the solution build with no problems, the MSI even gets created, but still 1 failure), thereby killing our nightly building of it. 16 hours is enough time wasted jacking with it. I’m going to change the game.

Also WiX is the future. I’ve wanted to move to it for a long time (since my first post on it in 2004… lol), but didn’t have a solid case. Now I do, so now we are…

I already have our Solution’s WiX project built, finished and the MSI working. The next step will be to TeamBuild the WiX project (which I’m hoping will go pretty smooth… damn… Now I’ve done it. Having said that, I’ve just out a hex on it… lol ;)

Enough for now. If we have any issues TeamBuilding it (good or bad) either Peter or I will blog about it.

News:

Some Getting Started Resources:

Project Home - http://wix.sourceforge.net/
Gábor DEÁK JAHN’s WiX tutorial - http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/
Alex Shevchuk - From MSI to WiX (16 part series)
Code Project - Creating an installer using Wix v3.0, Votive, and Visual Studio 2005/2008
Code Project - Creating an installer using Wix v3.0, Votive, and Visual Studio 2005/2008 - Part 2, the GUI
WixWiki
WiX (as seen in VS2010) Documentation CTP – What is WiX, how to use it, and how to extend it

Upgrade (Uninstall an older version of an app when installing a new version):

Alex Shevchuk - From MSI to WiX, Part 8 - Major Upgrade
WixWiki - UpgradeVersion Element
Another trick I took from the Setup Project, is to increment the Product Version (Product element, Version attribute) and create a new Product Code GUID (Product element, ID attribute). So far this seems to work fine and should be TeamBuild “Task’able.”