I certainly think that WiX is the way to go. WiX bundle.exe with a custom BA (or WixStdBA and possibly a bafuntions.dll) and external packages staged for web deployment, is a very flexible framework. A wix bundle can be an 'addon', 'upgrade', or 'patch' to an installed wix bundle (and the packages in the "fix" bundle do not need to be msp packages). So in one situation with a large legacy (InstallScript) suite setup, which I have not fully converted to wix/msi yet, I inserted a Wix bundle into a new release of the legacy setup, which it installs silently as part of that suite of products. Now at a later time I can create a "related" wix bundle and release it as a small downloadable 'Fix' or 'addon' with a new feature. It then becomes a part of the original legacy suite (the inserted bundle), and if that suite is uninstalled then the 'addon' is also uninstalled. If when the 'addon' is installed, it registered to more than one already installed wix bundles then the wix framework reference counts the dependencies and only uninstalls the 'addon' when all registered bundles have been removed. So all of this 'complexity' is handled for you by the Wix Toolset. When using the Wix bundle, you would customize as needed the BA to detect, display UI, and plan the changes, and then use MSI Properties to drive (headless) msi packages to do the actual system changes. Depending on how the web deployment is implemented, an atom feed is typically used, and therefore an application could check the feed for updates. There is good work being done by Jacob to extend this concept and make the framework even easier to use.
-- View this message in context: http://windows-installer-xml-wix-toolset.687559.n2.nabble.com/Implementing-Microsoft-Fixit-is-Wix-the-right-tool-tp7599538p7599546.html Sent from the wix-users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dive into the World of Parallel Programming The Go Parallel Website, sponsored by Intel and developed in partnership with Slashdot Media, is your hub for all things parallel software development, from weekly thought leadership blogs to news, videos, case studies, tutorials and more. Take a look and join the conversation now. http://goparallel.sourceforge.net/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
