Book Image

WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML

Book Image

WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML

Overview of this book

The cryptic science of Windows Installer can seem far off from the practical task of simply getting something installed. Luckily, we have WiX to simplify the matter. WiX is an XML markup, distributed with an open-source compiler and linker, used to produce a Windows Installer package. It is used by Microsoft and by countless other companies around the world to simplify deployments. "WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML" promises a friendly welcome into the world of Windows Installer. Starting off with a simple, practical example and continuing on with increasingly advanced scenarios, the reader will have a well-rounded education by book's end. With the help of this book, you'll understand your installer better, create it in less time, and save money in the process. No one really wants to devote a lifetime to understanding how to create a hassle-free installer. Learn to build a sophisticated deployment solution targeting the Windows platform in no time with this hands-on practical guide. Here we speed you through the basics and zoom right into the advanced. You'll get comfortable with components, features, conditions and actions. By the end, you'll be boasting your latest deployment victories at the local pub. Once you've finished "WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML", you'll realize just how powerful and awesome an installer can really be.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Deployment Tools Foundation


Writing custom actions with .NET code means making use of the Deployment Tools Foundation (DTF). Here, we'll touch on some of the more common parts of the DTF library. However, you should also take a look at the DTF documentation that comes with WiX if you'd like to explore some of its other features. For example, although we won't cover it here, DTF has support for LINQ and CAB file compression. The examples in this section draw from DTF's Microsoft.Deployment.WindowsInstaller namespace.

The session object

When the InstallUISequence and InstallExecuteSequence tables run through their lists of actions, they're doing so in their own memory space—called a session. You've seen how this requires you to mark WiX properties as public (uppercase) to get them from one session to the other. In DTF, the Session object is your pipeline into each sequence's running state. Every .NET custom action method receives session in its parameter list. If you recall, the generic signature...