WiX

Rob Mensching writes in a post that WiX has an online manual for version 2 and that eventually a manual for version 3 will show up.

My last post showed how to use VBScript functions as CustomActions. More than often you need to access some of the properties you have defined in your WIX files, for example an installation directory, a connection string etc.To access these properties just use the Session object and it’s a Property property.Here’s an example with two properties used: set adam = GetObject(Session.Property("ADSERVER") & "/" & Session.Property("ADSPATH")) The WIX file should contain two properties:

Here are some small tips when using VBScript CustomActions using WIX.Creating a script CustomActionFirst of all you have to create a CustomAction in your WXS file: <CustomAction Id="Id_Of_ScriptAction" BinaryKey="Id_of_binary" VBScriptCall="Script_Name" /> Id_Of_ScriptAction is a unique Id of your CustomActionID_of_binary is the unique Id of the binary that contains the vbs file.Script_Name is the name of the Sub or Function in your vbs file. Creating the VBS fileCreate a .VBS file with a function or sub that should be executed.

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.