I have for a few interesting weeks been using Microsoft Windows Installer Xml, aka WIX, to create an MSI installer for our software solution (finally the number of installation has increased so it was worth it :-).
Our software is higly configurable and modularized so I needed to use a tool more advanced that the built-in installers in Visual Studio.Net - and the choice was to use WIX.

For you out there who doesn't know what WIX is then the short story is that; WIX is toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The source code and binaries to WIX can be found on SourceForge.

To create an MSI you just tap in some XML code and use the provided compilers and linkers and you are up and running in a few minutes - with a simple installation package.
Bur, when making a more complex installer you will probably run into trouble due to the lack of documentation on the subject, even if it contains a nice help file I found out that Google was the best source of documentation.

I ran into some troubles when I was creating CustomActions and I thought I would write a more thorough article about that in a near future. I found out that making CustomActions using scripts (VB and JavaScript) was really successfull.

Are you interested in reading more about WIX check out the blog of Rob Mensching or this great tutorial by Gábor Deák Jahn.

What do you think about WIX?

And finally: congratulations to the WIX project which celebrates two year anniversary today.