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Showing posts from February, 2011

Building Windows installer with WiX

WiX is Windows Installer XML (WIX) Toolset. It's an open source project coming from Microsoft. Actually, it was the first project that Microsoft has officially published under Open Source license. Initially it appeared on SF.NET, but recently has moved to Microsoft's owned CodePlex.com. Half of the internet still points to SF though. This tool let's you pack a bunch of files into a user-friendly MSI installer, including GUI, silent install, repair, windows registry editing and Start menu customizations. WiX is a bunch of cool ideas. The first one goes with the each tools names. There's Heat, Candle and Light. They act as preprocessor, linker and compiler. So no matter whether you know everything about compilers, or you always left it to the IDE - tools seem friendly from the very first look. As name says it, the spine of the toolset is XML. To turn on the heat, developer needs to specify files to install, user interface, user interactions, install steps, resources and c