Sometimes, your software is going to require a lot of files: there's the main executable, supporting libraries, images, configuration files, help documentation, and potentially more. You might start out writing the Component elements by hand, but pretty soon it's going to amount to more than you'd care to take on.

The WiX team has provided a tool called Heat to shoulder the burden. You can take this utility and point it at a directory of files, and it will generate the WiX markup for you. In this recipe, we'll try it out by creating a directory of text files and then run Heat to turn it into a .wxs file. Heat is included in the WiX toolset.