Migrating Setup projects to WiX

Question

This must surely be a FAQ...

Is there anything available now or will there be anything available to take an 'old' setup project done in VS2008 and convert it to WiX, or do I need to re-write my setup projects?

Thanks

Graham 

Answer 1

A couple of hints:
1) The full WiX toolset has a lot more capability than plain setup projects that build MSI files, so for things like creating web sites it would be better to evaluate the WiX extensions for custom actions and use them.
2) The WiX toolset includes Dark.exe, this reverse-engineers an MSI file to WiX source, so that's a good starting point.

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Phil Wilson

Answer 2

 

There is no out-of-the-box support for migrating from setup projects to Windows Installer XML toolset projects in Visual Studio 2010. This could be part of a future release though.

As PhilWilson mentioned, the best place to start is dark. Dark.exe is part of the public Windows Installer XML toolset; Dark converts MSI and MSM files into a WiX source file. However, the output still needs to be “tweaked” to get to the desired authoring. After cleaning up your authoring, all what you need is to include it into a newly created WiX project in VS and you are good to go. Modulo custom actions, you should easily be able to get a working Windows Installer XML toolset project from your current setup project.

For more information about dark, go to: http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix2/dark.htm

 

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Mohamed Hegazy