Martijn van Schie

Introduction In a previous post I showed you how to use the UIExtensions library to add predefined user interfaces to you installer. These UIExtensions are easy to use, but what if none of these suit your needs. It is possible to customize the selected UI Extension and it is quit easy to do. The following example will show you have to remove the LicenseAgreementDlg from the UI sequence of the WixUI_InstallDir extension. Steps Get the source code for the UIExtension First thing you need to do is get the sources for the version of WiX you are using. After you have downloaded them, you van browse to the UIExtension folder to get the wxs fragment file that contains the extension <SOURCE FOLDER>\src\ext\UIExtension\wixlib When you open the extension WiX file (in this case WixUI_InstallDir) you will see a fragment with the ID used by the UIRef node. < Wix xmlns = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi" > < Fragment > < UI ...

I am working on new project where i am introducing the WiX Toolkit as part of our automated build process using TFSBuild. As the project evolves I am publishing my findings on this blog. The Yet Another WiX Tutorial consists of the following parts: Yet Another WiX Tutorial Part 1 : An Introduction Yet Another WiX Tutorial Part 2: Your First Installer Yet another WiX Tutorial Part 3: Customizing the UI dialogs More to come … Enjoy.

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...

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 ...