Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset

Re:Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset by viraptor on Saturday April 06, 2024 @04:30AM (#39950947)

Same, but I just gave up after 2 days. I really wish there was a one-click option in VS.net to create an installer that checks/pulls the required version of runtime, installs the target exe, all its DLL dependencies, and all custom files marked for release.

It's what 99.9% of apps need, so why is there no "do the defaults" path? You even need to pass things through the Heat generator to get multiple resulting files listed automatically. This is not an exclusive Wix issue though - no project offers that as far as I can tell and it really sucks.

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Re:Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset by kiike on Saturday April 06, 2024 @09:25AM (#39952289)

I'm not a developer for Windows apps but had to use WiX to generate an installer for a Python open source project I am collaborating with. Installing one binary in a specific location? Easy. Couple hundred files distributed among multiple nested directories? That was a miserable experience and but I could manage to pull it off. I didn't use heat. The XML was hand-coded and the file listing was generated with a Python script that walked the directory tree and generated the Directory, Component and ComponentGroup entries.

Apparently with Wix4, heat is deprecated, unneeded in Wix5. I couldn't even get it to install and have the executable. So confusing!

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Re:Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset by henry_flower on Saturday April 06, 2024 @03:00PM (#39954567)

heh, I recently "ported" a Linux app to Windows and wrote a simple installer using wix 5 (it was horrible)

to even obtain wix v5: first, using scoop, I installed "dotnet-sdk"; second, using the "dotnet" command, I got the wix.exe executable via

> dotnet tool install --prerelease --global wix

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