Making WiX more approachable with the WiX Artefacts Creator for VS2010

Visual Studio Gallery - Wix Artefacts Creator

"Visual studio 2010 Add-in to create Wix Artefacts

When anyone like me starts working on WIX project, the very first thought comes in mind is that why it’s not simple. Other thoughts to follow may be like why we have to write big XML part manually, specify all the files manually, generate GUID for every single component, documentation is so verbose that it is difficult to grab decent knowledge on this product etc. etc.. 

I thought why creating installer using WIX is not as easy as creating normal visual studio setups. Just add the setup project to solution, select project output and you are done. Hardly one minute work.

After working on Windows Installer XML projects for long time, I realized that it is time to simplify this process. The simplest solution which everyone understands is to provide visual studio setup projects kind of functionality. To facilitate this I have created Visual studio 2010 Add-in which serve the same purpose. Currently this add-in supports setup creation for Web based application (Web application, Web services, WCF services etc.), Console Applications, Class Library Applications and Windows services.

You can find user guide for this add-in @ below location.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B51-o0oYgmeUWEV5bmlfRndOOFk/edit?pli=1

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I'll be keeping an eye out for the VS2012 version (and/or do the hacks necessary to enable this to install for it ;)