These suggestions are primarily for the dev team. I am not an expert on deployment, but I have used InstallShield, NSIS and Visual Studio to create installers in the past. Overall, I have found the easiest to use and maintain to be NSIS.
I've recently started a project using WIX, the existing installer is done in NSIS. The switch to WIX is to stay on the Microsoft stack, and hopefully to be able to deploy patches and upgrades more easily. It is one of the more simple installers I've had to develop, however it has been in progress for over two weeks - the longest I've ever spent on an installer. Here is a list of the areas I've been struggling in and some suggestions. 1. Registering Visual Studio Packages One of the tasks in the installer is to register a Visual Studio package. There is a nice util provided in Visual Studio to generate WIX code that will register a package, unfortuantly this generates WIX 2 code, and I ended up having to write a tool to upgrade the output to WIX 3. This isn't really a good approach. I would prefer this kind of thing to be handled by an extension that could be added to the project that would add an attribute to the component node "RegisterAsVsAddIn". There would be some attributes on the DLL itself so that the WIX compiler knew when it's code should be run, but essentially it would do the same thing as the regpkg tool I mentioned. 2. Including Directories With Lots of Files Coming from NSIS, this one was the biggest pain in the butt. Heat was crashing on me, so I wasn't able to use this to generate the code. I had to roll my own utility to do this. Again, this would be best if it was built into WIX as some kind of extension. Weather it's done by some new type of node that generates code that persists or it adds the entries directly to the MSI at compile time is not imporant to me. 3. Documentation The documentation needs lots of work. I found myself looking at the MSI documentation on the MSDN just to figure out what the corrolary in WIX was. This stuff needs to be explained, it can't be assumed that a developer picking up WIX has an intimate understanding of how MSI works. The more examples the better. In some of the code generated by regpkg [#file_somefile] which didn't relate to a file name. I wasn't able to search on #file in the CHM file and didn't see it anywhere online. I had to figure what this was by trial and error which wasted just about an hour worth of time. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
