Hi group; I'm new to WiX and have a couple questions that I couldn't immediately find answered anywhere.
First of all, I'm looking forward to working with WiX as I like complete control over what I build, but in a simple manner, and it looks like that's the whole point of WiX, so I'm pretty excited about it. 1. Anyway, I'm developing a .NET app (3.5 sp1 client profile), and therefore need to include a bootstrapper. While I managed (by reading the wix.chm help file) to get the bootstrapper hooked up by editing the project file, I'm not thrilled with the results. First of all, it results in a lot of crap being added to the final output directory, rather than to the msi file itself, making deployment that much more difficult (see my next question). But worse, it doesn't actually work at all. The setup.exe file will launch the .NET bootstrapper fine, which runs and seems to work properly, but then when that completes I get an error telling me that setup cannot locate the file "...MyInstaller.msi". It gives me the full path (I hope this isn't being hardcoded), but even if I copy and paste that path into explorer, it finds and launches the msi fine. So why it cannot find it I do not know. Ideally I would actually like to avoid having to create a bunch of extra and separate files in the output directory. I already have DotNetFx35ClientSetup.exe--can't I just add this file to the installer as a custom action (that only executes if needed--that's another problem, it seems to run/install every time even if I already have the framework installed) rather than having to create a bootstrapper? Or will that not work for some reason? If not, I'm also wondering how I might change the command-line arguments used to invoke the bootstrapper from the setup.exe. I tried editing the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bootstrapper\Packages\DotNetFx35Client\en\package.xml file, but that didn't seem to do a thing. 2. This is one area I feel rather at a loss in, because it seems everyone knows something I don't. When you generate an installer, it results in an msi file, but as the above question illustrated, this is not always the only thing generated. How am I supposed to deploy my program as a single file on the web, if the installation is split up into a bunch of files and folders? The only way I've known to do this is to use a "self-extracting executable maker" to pack all the different parts into a self-extracting .exe that can extract to a TEMP dir and launch a file from the extracted archive. My question is does WiX come with this kind of thing built-in, or am I forced to use some third-party tool? Or is there something I'm totally missing that makes this unnecessary? It seems all the tutiorials and manuals only go so far as to generate the .msi, but not how to deploy it over the web. If WiX doesn't have such a feature, is this not something that would be valuable to add to the project? I've yet to find the perfect self-extracting installer maker (please tell me if you have), and it would make things much easier if this were actually part of the WiX project or a sub-project. Thanks for your help, I hope WiX will be able to give me the control I want over my application's installation process. Logan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
