Martijn van Schie

Introduction What is in this tutorial In this part of the WiX tutorial i will guide you trough your first WiX installer and explain what the important concepts are when creating a WiX file. Requirements for this part of the tutorial is that you installed the WiX toolkit as described in part 1 of this tutorial. Structure of a WiX script If we look at the structure of a MSI package you will see some principles that come back in the WiX script. A MSI has one or more features . A feature has one or more components . A component consists of one or more items to be installed. A component is a group of items and actions that should be installed or executed when that component is selected to be installed. The most common items would be some files and a shortcut , and an action could be to copy a file. Creating the project The WiX project We start by creating a new solution that contains a WiX project. The WiX Project template presents you with the following

Patterns & Practices I have put together an interesting list of all Patterns and Practices books available on the internet that i could find. Most of the have some relation to development. If you know some that are missing, please let me know. Architecture Application Architecture for .NET: Designing Applications and Services HTML | PDF Application Architecture Guide 2.0 HTML | PDF Enterprise Solution Patterns Using Microsoft .NET HTML | PDF Development .NET Data Access Architecture Guide HTML – PDF Exception Management in .NET HTML | PDF Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability HTML | PDF Security Improving Web Service Security Guide HTML | PDF Building Secure ASP.NET Applications HTML | PDF Web Service Security HTML | PDF Security Engineering Explained HTML | PDF Improving Web Application Security: Threats and Countermeasures HTML | PDF Building Secure ASP.NET Applications: Authentication, Auth

Introduction A well known service oriented scenario is where a client and service application communicate using message exchange over a channel. This channel is either secured, using for instance SSL, or unsecured where the data is send in plain text. One of the commonly used message bases is XML. XML is a standard way of describing relational data, and can be read by most platforms. This makes XML a interoperable message base. On the downside, this message type is easy to read and it therefore easy to change. If a third party where to intercept the message, for instance using a proxy server, it could easily change the content of the message and send it to the original endpoint. This is called tampering. To detect changes to the content, a message send through the channel can be signed. Signing is a way to provide reliable messaging over a non-secure channel. It also provides some sort of authentication because the message can be validate that is was send from the expected cli

WiX in a nutshell Quote: The Windows Installer XML (WiX) is a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. The toolset supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages. I could not have said it better myself. The main components The three mains components I use from the toolkit are the following. (Although i found another useful one called heat.exe that I'll explain in a later tutorial) candle.exe : used to compile a WiX file light.exe : used to create the MSI from the compiled file dark.exe : used to decompile a MSI into a WiX script The usage of WiX Introduction In one of the projects I'm working on we use Windows Installer XML (or WiX) to create a setup package during the automated build process. Although we have the build process under control, and we have a generic way of integrating WiX in our build process i wanted to know

Hi, and welcome to my blog. I started this blog because i find myself surfing the net for new stuff and never have take the time to keep track of everything. Most of the time i collect info from different resources and in the end lose track of it. This blog will be my repository for my findings, and should be a resource for later. I will start with a set of tutorials about WiX. Enjoy. Gr. Martijn.