Here are some of the Microsoft products and groups that use WiX for their installations:
* Office 2007 * Office Server 2007 * Windows SharePoint Server * SQL Server 2005 * Visual Studio * Windows Defender Additionally, there are several non-Microsoft products that use WiX. The biggest one that comes to mind is MySQL. There are lots more, but I can't remember off the top of my head. WiX has become the de-facto installation technology within Microsoft and all of the major product groups use it for their installations. If you or your client are worried about the stability, robustness, etc. don't be. The fact that some of the largest software products in the world use WiX should be testament enough that it's enterprise ready. Now, having said that, it doesn't mean that WiX is complete by any means. There is still lots of active development that goes on in the 3.0 version (which is still beta). Also, although there's a Visual Studio development experience, Votive still lacks a lot of the nice GUI designers that you'll find in Wise or InstallShield. There are some 3rd party designers for WiX files also available. And yes, sadly our documentation is not up to snuff yet. Let us know if you have any other questions. Justin -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jacek Blaszczynski Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 2:58 PM To: 'Mike Dimmick'; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Convincing customer to use WiX toolset - is itenterprise ready? Hello! Thnx for replies - they are very helpful. Can someone from MSFT WiX developers confirm which enterprise grade product installers are currently created with help of WiX package? Rgrds Jacek -----Original Message----- From: Mike Dimmick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 9:48 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: RE: [WiX-users] Convincing customer to use WiX toolset - is itenterprise ready? I know that Microsoft use WiX for at least some parts of the SQL Server 2005, Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 installers. Version 2.0.x is considered the stable version. It does get bugfixes, but no major new development. Version 3.0.x is considered the unstable development version. The versions at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=105970 of both are considered particularly stable; there are point releases (approximately weekly) at http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/ (when it works). Most people want to download the binaries or the Votive MSI, not the sources package. It's self-contained - no other tools are necessary, not even the Windows Installer SDK. Votive is the GUI, which is a Visual Studio integration package. The documentation is in the 'doc' folder of the binaries package as a chm file. Documentation is currently a weak area - the WiX.chm file gives the syntax, but not really much in the way of semantics. There's a tutorial at http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/. WiX gives mostly direct access to the Windows Installer tables, so the SDK documentation is often the best source for understanding what's going on. I also find Phil Wilson's book "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" useful, although it may be helpful if you've had some experience with Visual Studio's deployment projects before reading it. You should probably also read Rob Mensching's blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/. To see how the default user interface looks during an install, get the UI sample linked from http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/lesson2.php (http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/download.php?file=samplewixui.zip&type=appl ication/zip). This uses the WixUI-Mondo user interface. However, WiX is a full Windows Installer tool, and can create any UI that the developer can think of and that the Windows Installer runtime will support. If you want to do something that Windows Installer cannot support (um, like all the Microsoft applications listed above!) then you need to create an external UI handler program, but that is actually not very common. The documentation at http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix2/wix_index.htm is for WiX v2.0, and is a little out of date - I'm not sure when it was last generated. It's basically the same information as in the HTML Help file. -- Mike Dimmick -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jacek Blaszczynski Sent: 06 November 2006 10:51 To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [WiX-users] Convincing customer to use WiX toolset - is itenterprise ready? Hello! I am in process of trying to convince customer who looks for enterprise grade InstallShield installation package improvements. I have proposed to replace it with WiX based installer and pointed him to WiX sourceforge.net site and got a very fast answer with several doubts: 1. " .... The sourceforge site indicates this is still in beta, so it is probally not ready for use for a commercial project which we need to distribute to enterprise customers. ... " 2. " .... I have downloaded the Wix package to take a look, but I could not find any documentation for it, and it does not appear to be a complete package. ... " 3. " .... If I could find a working example of it to see how the user interface looks during an install I might consider using it, but I would perfer either InstallShield or Wise. ... " Obviosuly I could respond to all this and other serius doubts raised by customer myself but I thought that this process may be of interest to WiX community and I may receive good support in finding arguments in favor of WiX. The most important thing is to show enterprise level installation packages created with WiX - please point me to most prominent installation packages created using WiX toolset which at the best should be available for download and testing. Please indicate as well: 1) links to the latest but still complete packages (i.e. not requiring hunting for dependencies, docs or WiX tools) working out of box - I almost always had a lot problems using packages downloaded from sourceforge. 2) links to authoritative sites describing WiX package 3) links to most recent documetation available online. Regards Jacek ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
