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

Running an executable as a custom action without showing a console window by using CAQuietExec


As you may know, it's possible to execute a Windows batch script as a custom action. Then again, if you're able to not use a batch script, preferring a more robust mechanism such as a C# custom action, then that's better. However, sometimes you just can't avoid it. In those cases, one annoyance is that a console window will be displayed while the batch script is running. In this recipe, we'll see how to hide it from the user.

Getting ready

To prepare for this recipe, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new setup project and call it QuietCustomActionInstaller.

  2. We will create a batch script that prints a sequence of numbers to the console for a few seconds, long enough to be noticeable. Open a text editor such as notepad and enter the following code:

    @ECHO OFF
    FOR /L %%i IN (1,1,10000) DO ECHO %%i
  3. Save this file as BatchScript.cmd and put it in the same folder as your setup project.

  4. Reference it in your...