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

Executing either a 64-bit or 32-bit MSI depending on the user's operating system

An MSI can target a 64-bit or 32-bit processor architecture, but never both. An MSI contains metadata called Template Summary that denotes which architecture it supports, and it can only support one or the other at a time. However, there is a way to give the user a single package that will install either 64-bit or 32-bit software, depending on their operating system. In this recipe, we will build such a package, combining both architectures into a single bootstrapper bundle.

Getting ready

To prepare for this recipe, follow these steps:

  1. Create two new setup projects within the same Visual Studio solution. The first is our 32-bit installer and is called ThirtyTwoBitInstaller. It targets ProgramFilesFolder in its directory structure:
    <Directory Id="TARGETDIR" Name="SourceDir">
      <Directory Id="ProgramFilesFolder">
        <Directory Id="INSTALLFOLDER" 
         ...