Book Image

WiX Cookbook

By : Nicholas Matthew Ramirez
1 (1)
Book Image

WiX Cookbook

1 (1)
By: Nicholas Matthew Ramirez

Overview of this book

WiX is a dialect of XML used to make installers for Windows. Its declarative style avoids the complexity and limitations of procedural code, providing you with everything you need to package up an entire application into a single MSI file. This book gives you a good overview of WiX's capabilities to develop your own installer packages with functionalities beyond those available in Windows Installer. In the recipes of this book, you will see ways in which WiX can cut down on your installation time and help you streamline your deployment processes. You will see how to make customized installer UIs, write custom actions, create shortcuts, and also set your application as the default for a file type.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
14
Index

Introduction

Shortcuts offer a big convenience for users, allowing them to launch applications and open directories without having to search through their C: drive to get to them. During installation, we can add shortcuts to the Windows Start menu, the user's desktop, or any other directory we choose. Shortcuts can be customized with icons and labels, and they can even specify command-line switches to pass to the target application.

We can also create a special type of shortcut, called an advertised shortcut that acts as a link to a feature that we haven't installed yet. When the user clicks on the shortcut for the first time, the feature will be installed on demand. In this chapter, we'll explore several types of shortcuts that are commonly used.