Book Image

WiX: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML

Book Image

WiX: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML

Overview of this book

WiX is an open source project and a toolset that builds Windows installation packages from XML source code. WiX, which is used internally by Microsoft and by many companies around the World, simplifies many of the installation tasks that used to be shrouded in mystery. The tool set provides a command-line environment that you can integrate into your old-style build processes or you can use the newer technology from inside integrated development environments to build your setup packages. You'll find that you understand your installer better, can create it in less time, and save money in the process. No one really wants to devote a lifetime to understanding how to create a hassle-free installer for any software. This hands-on guide takes the mystery out of Windows Installer by showing how simple XML elements can be leveraged to create a sophisticated install package. By relying on Microsoft standards, you'll be able to use features like Property elements to customize your application's entry in Add/Remove Programs, the Shortcut element to create Start menu shortcuts, and other specialized elements for building upgrade and patch support and more. This book will show you the fundamental ingredients needed to build a professional-grade installer using Windows Installer XML. The initial chapters will introduce you to the set of required elements necessary to build a simple installer. We'll then explore those basic elements in more detail and see how best to use them in the real world.In the ensuing chapters, you'll move on to learn about adding conditions that alter what the user can install, then how to add actions to the install sequence and how to author a user interface. We'll move on to advanced topics such as editing data in the Windows Registry, installing a Windows service, and building your project from the command line. Finally, you'll learn to localize your package for different languages and detect older versions during upgrades. Each chapter uses to-the-point examples to illustrate the best way to use the language.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
WiX: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
4
Improving Control with Launch Conditions and Installed States
7
Using UI Controls

Creating your own dialogs


In this section, we'll discard the premade dialogs and create our own. This should give you a much deeper understanding of how things work.

ICE20 errors

For these first exercises, you'll have to ignore some of WiX's warnings. Go to the Properties page for the project, select Tools Settings and add a rule to ignore the validation test ICE20. This test checks that you've added FilesInUse, Error, FatalError, UserExit, and Exit dialogs. That's a lot to start out with, so for now just ignore those rules.

What are these dialogs? They are all windows that serve the purpose of showing an error or a message explaining that the installation has completed successfully. They show up automatically when they're needed. Later in the chapter, I'll show how you can create these dialogs to meet the requirements of ICE20.

Adding dialog files

Let's remove the reference to the WixUIExtension.dll and the UIRef that points to a standard dialog. We'll be creating everything ourselves now to...