Since Rob Mensching offered up the WiX toolset as the first open source project from Microsoft in 2004, it has been quietly gaining momentum and followers. Today, thousands use it to build Window Installer packages from simple XML elements. Gone are the days when you would have had to pay for software to build an installer for you. Now, you can do it yourself for cheap.
Not only that, but WiX has matured into a fairly slick product that's sufficiently easy to use. Best of all, it has the bells and whistles you want, including functionality to add user interface wizards, Start menu shortcuts, control Windows services, and read and write to the registry.
This new edition, WiX 3.6: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML, brings you up-to-date on the latest changes to the toolset. Whether you're new to WiX or an established pro, you're likely to find new insights. Each chapter gets straight to the point, giving you hands-on experience, so you'll master the technology quickly.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, explains how after downloading and installing the WiX toolset, you'll start using it right away to create a simple installer. Then, you'll see how to add a basic user interface to it, install it with logging turned on, and view its internal database.
Chapter 2, Creating Files and Directories, gives you a deeper understanding of how files are installed and the best way to organize them in your project. You'll then use the tool Heat.exe to generate WiX markup. Last, you'll learn about copying and moving files, and installing special-case files.
Chapter 3, Putting Properties and AppSearch to Work, introduces you to Windows Installer properties, including those that are defined automatically and those that are invented by you. Afterwards, you'll check the end user's computer for specific files, directories, registry keys, and INI file settings using AppSearch.
Chapter 4, Improving Control with Launch Conditions and Installed States, teaches you to leverage conditional statements to set prerequisites for running your installer or to exclude particular features or components from the install. You'll also discover how to check the action state and installed state of your features and components.
Chapter 5, Understanding the Installation Sequence, gives you a clear picture of how the whole installation process works as you examine the order and meaning of installer actions. You will then create custom actions and add them to this built-in sequence. Then, you'll learn the basics of using the Deployment Tools Foundation library for writing custom action code in C#.
Chapter 6, Adding a User Interface, after giving you a quick introduction to the standard dialogue wizards that come with the WiX toolset, shows how to build your own from scratch. You'll learn all of the required elements for displaying dialogs and linking them together. You'll also see how to display common messages such as errors and cancellation confirmations.
Chapter 7, Using UI Controls, gives you hands-on experience with each type of UI control including buttons, textboxes, and progress bars.
Chapter 8, Tapping into Control Events, breathes life into your UI controls by having them publish and subscribe to events. We'll get details on what each event does and take a closer look at those you'll use on a routine basis.
Chapter 9, Working from the Command Line, emphasizes the fact that we don't particularly need Visual Studio to compile our projects. We'll cover the commands necessary to build an installer from the command line using Candle.exe, our compiler, and Light.exe, our linker/binder. We will also explore how to use preprocessor statements and how to create a custom preprocessor extension.
Chapter 10, Accessing the Windows Registry, illustrates how our installer may read and write to the Windows Registry. We'll add and remove keys, copy values, and set permissions.
Chapter 11, Controlling Windows Services, provides some solid examples for installing and interacting with Windows services. You'll see how to set the service's user account, add service dependencies, and set failure recovery.
Chapter 12, Localizing Your Installer, tackles how to render your UI for different languages and how Light.exe, the WiX linker, plays a role. You'll then get involved in making a single multi-language installer.
Chapter 13, Upgrading and Patching, covers the all-so-important topic of upgrading and patching. You'll get the low down on major upgrades, minor upgrades, and small updates.
Chapter 14, Extending WiX, jumps into adding new, custom XML elements for extending the core functionality of WiX. We'll write a library, using C#, that takes our installer to places it's never been.
Chapter 15, Bootstrapping Prerequisites with Burn, discusses the new bootstrapping functionality called Burn. We'll create a single executable that installs all necessary prerequisites for our software.
Chapter 16, Customizing the Burn UI, solves the problem of customizing our Burn user interface by crafting a new one using C# and WPF. We'll discover the places where we can hook into the bootstrapper engine and how best to pass information from the user to our installation packages.
In order to both write and run the code demonstrated in this book, you will need the following:
Visual Studio 2005 or newer (Standard Edition or higher)
The WiX toolset, which can be downloaded from http://wixtoolset.org/
If you are a developer and want to create installers for software targeting the Windows platform, then this book is for you. Those new to WiX and Windows Installer should feel right at home as we start with the basics and gradually work up to more complex subjects. Others with more experience will benefit as we catalog the new features in WiX 3.6. If you're coming from an earlier version of WiX, you'll be happy to know that for the most part, things that used to work will still work. However, several tasks, such as implementing a major upgrade, have been simplified. We'll highlight the big changes, but keep an eye on familiar elements as some subtle changes have been made.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "If you would like conditions to be re-evaluated during a re-install, you should set the Transitive attribute on the parent component to yes."
A block of code is set as follows:
<Feature Id="MainFeature"
Title="Main Feature"
Level="1">
<ComponentRef Id="CMP_InstallMeTXT" />
<Condition Level="0">
< ![CDATA[NOT REMOVE = "ALL" AND MyProperty = "some value"]]>
</Condition>
</Feature>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
<Property Id="MyProperty"
Value="1" />
<Component Id="CMP_InstallMeTXT"
Guid="7AB5216B-2DB5-4A8A-9293-F6711FFAAA83">
<File Id="FILE_InstallMeTXT"
Source="InstallMe.txt"
KeyPath="yes" />
<Condition>MyProperty = 1</Condition>
</Component>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
msiexec /i myInstaller.msi /l*v install.log
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "using the Add Reference option in Solution Explorer".
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