Brian Kohrs’ Blog

At work, we are using Wise as our installation solution. However, I have been very unhappy with the quality of their software. Many times when trying to get something to work in Wise, it comes to the point where you ask the question,”What is the stupidest thing that I could do to get this to work.” Usually the answer to that question is what we have ended up doing to get the features that we want. Sam and I have thought about trying to roll our own Delphi application to do the installation, but there are some features of Windows Installer that we would miss without a lot of extra work.

Anyway, enough of that rant. I was looking at an issue with Svn1ClickSetup where it was not installing TortoiseSVN into the correct directory, and I was trying to find out if I was using the wrong MSI property to set the install directory (that was the case BTW). So I started poking around the Tortoise source code, trying to find their installation code. I finally found some files that looked promising, but they had the extension .wxs, which I was not familiar with. Viewing the files, they looked like some sort of XML way to specify an installation. Interesting. So after some googling, I found this site. WiX is a toolset that Microsoft has released (open-source, no less) to allow you to describe your MSI using XML. There is also a Visual Studio plug-in for developing WiX scripts.

I don’t know how easy it is to create an installation using WiX, especially for an installation as complex as ours, but it looks like it could be a possible replacement for Wise. Since it uses XML to describe the installation, there is always the possibility of writing an application to generate the code. Definitely something that bears some more research.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 5th, 2005 at 9:26 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.