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

Downloading resources from the Web with a web installer


A web installer is a bootstrapper that downloads some or all of its resources from the web during installation. This way, the initial download of the bootstrapper is faster, since its file size is much smaller. The main portion of it is hosted online where it's only downloaded when you need it. The disadvantage is that end users will need an Internet connection when they run the installer. However, in many cases, that's a small price to pay.

In this recipe, we'll need to have our resources hosted online. When I say resources, I'm talking about MSI packages, other executable installers, and patch files. To give you an idea about how it would work, we'll use an MSI file that's already on the Web: the Node.js installer.

Getting ready

To prepare for this recipe, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new bootstrapper project and call it WebInstaller.

  2. Download the Node.js MSI from http://nodejs.org/download and copy it to the directory of the...