Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Stick a fork in it, WiX (Windows Installer XML) 3.0 is done…

Aaron Stebner's WebLog - Final version of WiX v3.0 now available for download

“Over this past weekend, the 3.0.5419 build of WiX v3.0 was declared the final production build.  If you are using any builds of WiX v3.0 for your projects, I strongly encourage you to update to the 3.0.5419 build at this time.

Here is some additional information about WiX v3.0 and the final 3.0.5419 build:

…”

Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolset

“WiX v3.0 released.

July 4th, 2009

The final build of WiX v3.0 has been released. You can download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix/files/. Read more about the release by Rob and Bob.

…”

SourceForgeWiX Files

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WiX is one of of my favorite Windows Installer projects. Why? I dig how it’s XML driven. There’s no hidden magic, munging or mumbo-jumbo. It’s all there, in the XML. Meaning it can be easily tweaked with any tool or means/method that can tweak XML, from Notepad to MSBuild.

I did think it was a shame that it was pulled from VS2010. We really need a professional means to create MSI’s baked into Visual Studio and I thought this would be it. The existing Visual Studio Setup Projects are okay and great for simple stuff, but when you need to programmatically modify the setup or go beyond what’s there, then it’s kind of a brick wall.

Anyway, if you’re building setup packages, need to move beyond what comes with Visual Studio and don’t want to pay for a third-party product then you need to check out WiX.

(via Jason Haley - Interesting Finds: July 7, 2009)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
WiX Resources – Some help up the learning curve
WiX 3 is now officially in “Beta”

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hadn't heard that WiX was pulled from VS2010. That really stinks. The setup projects in VS can only be built with VS--not with MSBuild. Which means that if you want your build system to build those projects, you have to have VS installed on your build server. WiX doesn't have that problem, of course. WiX does have a high learning curve, though.