Easy Pack-Up of Your Application with WiX
Creating a MSI package to deploy your app can be a pain. MSI is a powerful tool but if all you need is to copy a few files around (one of the beautiful things of .NET apps)... building a MSI package can be rather painful.
Enter "WiX" (Windows Installer XML):
WIX Main Site on SourceForge
http://wix.sourceforge.net/
Good Details about WiX on Wikipedia (including how Office 2007 and SQL 2005 is packaged via WiX)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiX
Get Started with WiX v3 (most current version as of July 2007)
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=105970&package_id=168888
- Install the ProjectAggregator MSI first
- Install the Wix MSI last
- Done!
One of our new hires (Shen Yizhe) and I are working on a fun community project for Singapore. We are (hopefully) soon going to release the project to the community via CodePlex. Since not everyone really cares about the source code, we need to build a MSI that'll simply get you the app. WiX version 3 turned out to be a very easy thing to do.
In 2 hours, we went from "no clue" to a semi-complex, fully functional MSI package. WiX is integrated into Visual Studio 2005 and works with the TFS source control on CodePlex (yup... I can check-in/out straight from CodePlex with Team Explorer... how cool is that).
The MSI package is "declared" in a XML file. You specify where files from your projects are supposed to go plus a few other things and you're done. It's pretty cool. Go check out their site for more info.
The Single XML File for Your Package
FYI - Even though WiX v3 is marked unstable... I've had no problems. Unfort, WiX v2 projects didn't work with the CodePlex / Visual Studio source control.