Probably the least thought about, and planned for process in the development cycle is the installer. Since few projects get completed early, time for a well planned installation takes a back seat to the main development effort. However, we’ve all heard over and over that the customer’s first impression of your product will be your installer. At Tranxition, we were given the time to research the various installation products currently available, and decided to with WiX for a number of reasons.
Why WiX?
WiX has a couple great advantages. It integrates seamlessly with Visual Studio. This means it can be included in our nightly build process simply by including our installation projects into our Visual Studio solution. It produces an .msi file, allowing our installer to work on all Windows versions we need to support. Also, we get the installer repair and uninstall options for free. Speaking of getting things for free… WiX is free. Yes, a free open source Microsoft originated project.
You say nothing is ever free? That is somewhat true, there are some disadvantages. Documentation is scarce, you will depend heavily on blogs to learn the product, and figure out your issues. As an open source product, it has bugs (that so far I’ve been able to work around), but some times I’ve had to go back to an older installation, or needed to manually edit the project files. However, we have multiple configuration of our final product, seven different released products. The differences are mainly to the installer GUI, differing help files, and a couple customer specific DLLs. WiX works beautifully with these different configurations, and we don’t need to create a separate project per installer.
Over the next few months, I will detail our WiX installation scripts and configuration, the integration of our WiX projects into our MSBuild process, along with our build verification process. This first article, I will describe our installers, our build configurations, how we use the project configuration to create each of our product releases, and why this might help you decided to also use WiX.
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