I've been working on building an installer using Wix. Building an msi seems
to work well and I have no major problem. But where I'm getting bogged down
is in the things surrounding it, such as the setup.exe program. I have a
couple of questions.
1. I've noticed the setupbld.exe utility and I've tried it. It seems to
create a setup.exe with all files packed into a single EXE, which are then
extracted at runtime. That's good. But in addition to that, I also need a
setup.exe that will launch loose, uncompressed files for installation from a
CD. Can it currently do that as well?
2. This isn't so much a question as a feature request. I need for to the
setup.exe to show a language selection dialog to allow the user to select an
installation language (like Installshield does). I think I will probably try
to add it myself to the setupexe project if it never gets added by the Wix
guys.
3. I read about chaining as a way of handling more than one installation. I
currently have this requirement, since I need to install a driver and also
an application that works with the product. For various reasons, it's better
for us not to package these in the same installer. But chaining doesn't seem
like an ideal solution either---I think that automatically launching one
installer after another can be confusing to the end user.
I think a better solution, at least for CD installation, is to begin with a
menu. The menu allows the user to choose what to install; that is, which
installer to run. The menu can list the device installer and the application
installer. It can also allow users to optionally install things like Adobe
Reader if your documentation is in PDF form. I've seen some products that do
this and they have graphically pretty menu programs.
Unfortunately, in doing a search, I didn't find any decent existing software
for developing such a menu program. Can anyone recommend something? Sure,
perhaps it's really just a dialog with buttons, so you can probably write
one yourself (I'm a C++ programmer). But I was hoping to find something
that included some pre-designed fancy graphics, and allowed you to slap
together a menu launcher in an hour or so with no programming. Does this
make sense? Or am I thinking in the wrong direction?
Although I like the feeling of working "close to the metal" with Wix as
compared to some commercial product like InstallShield, I also seem to be
getting slowed by the setup.exe issues outside of the actual msi more than
anything.
Thanks for any comments.
Jim
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc.
Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop.
Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser.
Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/
_______________________________________________
WiX-users mailing list
WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
