![]() Instead of a tool with a graphical interface that allows the developers to collect the files and other related tasks making up the installation process manually, it is much more like a programming language. ![]() The toolset we are about to introduce, WiX, uses a different approach. However, as the experience of many developers shows, while these tools are perfectly capable of creating simpler installation packages, they often prove too limiting, inflexible when it comes to more complex requirements. The developers of the widely used setup tools also embraced the new technology and started to offer new versions of their tools to create setup programs of this nature. ![]() It is of paramount importance for setup developers to make sure that whatever happens during the process, the target machine should be left in a known, stable state, without introducing any detrimental side effects. While the imperative description seems to be quite sufficient until some error occurs, the declarative one makes it possible to cope with unexpected conditions, differing target machine environments, aborted installations, shared resources. The fundamental change was to move from the imperative description to a declarative one: rather than to describe the individual steps of installation, the declarative form specifies the state the target machine should be left in after various phases of installation and uninstallation. The technology behind Windows Installer, while it maintains a comparable look and feel for the end user, underwent important philosophical changes. Traditional setup tools used a programmatic, script-based approach to describe the various steps involved in the deployment of the application to be installed on the target machine: files to be copied, registry settings to be created, device drivers and services to be started. ![]() During the recent years, users have learned to expect a full-fledged, complete setup solution bundled with your product-and as the setup is the very first part of the application the end user becomes acquainted with, the importance of its integrity and reliability cannot be overestimated. Introductionįinishing the development of an application is still far from ending it. A list of resources is available on the WiX web site. There is a friendly community of WiX developers and users all over the Internet. Similarly, there might be a few additional utilities required for some special applications (merge modules, patches) but only on your build computer, the client will only need the finished and self-contained installer package, nothing else. The installation packages you create with the toolset do not require any extra framework or software to be installed on the target computer. However, this only applies to the toolset itself. The toolset is written in C# and requires the. This tutorial covers the stable version 3.x. You can download the latest binary and source code releases. WiX is an open source project, originally developed by Microsoft and maintained by Rob Mensching. The toolset provides both a command line environment that developers may either integrate into their oldstyle Makefile build processes or use the newer MSBuild technology from inside integrated development environments like Microsoft Visual Studio or SharpDevelop to build their MSI and MSM setup packages. The WiX Toolset is a set of tools that build Windows installation packages from XML source code. ![]()
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