You can try passing the high compression (-dcl:hi) switch to light, or setting CompressionLevel="high" on your <Media> element. WiX by default uses a moderate compression level which provides much faster builds but is slightly less optimal. However, I doubt that increasing the compression level will make up that 20MB difference.
Do you have any large bitmaps, custom action binaries, or other resources in the Binary table of the MSI? Those items don't get compressed when they're packed in the MSI, though they would when the MSI is further wrapped in an EXE as InstallShield does. If you do have large .BMP files, you can change them to .JPG or .PNG format. Beyond that I have to ask the obvious question: are you sure the set of payload files is the same? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tony Juricic Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 8:14 AM To: wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [WiX-users] The size of compressed Wix install compared to InstallShield equivalent I have ported InstallShield (version 12) project to Wix 3. InstallShield has msi embedded in exe and the whole setup.exe is 50 MB large. Wix creates MSI with embedded compressed CAB which takes 70 MB. 20 MB is a pretty large difference! Am I missing something obvious or is InstallShield compression really that superior? Thanks ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users