Hi Bob, I don't want to get into a religious argument over this, and Dana, yes I have read about the potential problems, I'm just looking for avenues to explore to get our development team on the right path. We use C# for almost everything else, so it's natural for us to want to use this language if at all possible, especially since Votive works so well in Visual Studio.
> How would C# make it easier to support uninstall, repair, rollback, > upgrades, and patching? I'm not a WiX or windows installer expert, but for what we want to do with the managed actions; uninstall and rollback would be probably treated the same i.e. leave everything as it was, likewise for upgrades and patches. Not sure about repair. I was actually talking more about leveraging our existing tools for debugging (e.g. log4net) as well as the tools that ship with .NET i.e. the Base Class Libraries. > What are some examples of grunt work? Sure. One example is our companies custom security and data extensions for Microsoft Reporting Services. Because this is an existing product, we can't just overwrite the xml configuration files that exist with our own versions. To take the RSSrvPolicy.config as an example, I have nearly 1,000 lines of XmlConfig code in the wxs file related to just 22 xml elements! This is one of six configuration files we have to modify. To be fair it's the largest but they all take time to develop and more importantly, because the idiosyncrasies of XmlConfig are difficult to develop and debug. Even Microsoft's own developers have problems with this: http://blogs.msdn.com/gisenberg/archive/2007/10/09/wix-v3-and-xmlconfig-xmlfile-troubleshooting.aspx What I'd like is something as simple as the XmlPoke and XmlPeek tasks that are found in NAnt. We'd also like an XmlBulkAdd action i.e. adding well-formed elements and attributes instead of having to treat each element value or attribute invidually. With those actions I could get my wxs file mentioned above down to less than 100 lines, making it easier to develop, understand, test and maintain. We'd also write an XmlTidy action - a few lines of C# thanks to the BCL - so that the xml files are left in a clean state after being touched, as anyone who has spent time with XmlFile and XmlConfig knows, they get messy quickly. Yes, no problem for a parser, but a pain for humans. If it's true that a Microsoft supported WiX variant will be in the next version of Visual Studio, expect a lot more of these sort of requests from other .NET developers in the not-to-distant future :) cheers si -- It's a wild world that we live in, you step to the vibe like a new found religion, take your position, compile your vision, futurism, algorithm has risen up! pfm - the western ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
