In part 1 we looked at the structure of a WiX setup project, and created a simple installer. We looked at the staging paradigm which gave us complete flexibility in the way we harvested files and packaged them into a deployment structure. We also looked at heat.exe, which we used to harvest files dynamically, and we concluded by wiring everything up into a single installer Feature. Today we're going to look at ways to configure our installer for different environments. Per-environment configuration ......
MSI is one of those technologies that has stood the test of time, and WiX is an increasingly popular way of creating these installer databases. There’s a perception that WiX is convoluted, complex and difficult to debug. Actually WiX really isn’t that daunting; you just need to understand that WiX has its own way of doing things, and there are some excellent practitioner resources on the web to help you -- for example http://wix.tramontana.co.hu. My purpose today is slightly different. First of all, ......
In MSBuild we define properties within a PropertyGroup and reference them with the $() notation. In WiX we have variables with a similar syntax, but which do not natively map to MSBuild properties. When working with WiX installer projects within Visual Studio however you will often want to change a WiX variable into an MSBuild property and vice versa. For example: Case 1: You want to bubble through MSBuild properties (for example, assembly version) into the MSI (referenced within the WiX document ......