What you is describing is harvesting and WiX 3.5 I believe had this functionality but was disabled by default. The wixproj is an msbuild document so you can hook any kind of prebuild target into it that you can imagine.
I personally don't do what you suggest though. I want to explictly add/remove files from my installers in a declarative fashion and not rely on an automagical easy button to make it happen for me. I've written tomes on why I choose to do it this way. I do like it to be easy though and since you mentioned merge modules, you should check out my open source project ISWIX ( iswix.codeplex.com ) It's a tool that makes authoring the modules faster and easier. Your merge modules might have a lot of files ( I once had a merge module with 10,000 files in it ) but I doubt the churn in the number of and names of the files really changes so much from one build to another that you can't be bothered to update the installer when needed. ---------------------------------------- From: "David Rickard (USA)" <davri...@microsoft.com> Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2011 12:11 PM To: "chr...@deploymentengineering.com" <chr...@deploymentengineering.com>, "General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset." <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Best way to invoke Wix from a TFS build workflow? Alright. In this case how would you run a program to add all the files in a given directory to the MSI? Before we had an EXE that generated a merge module of files based on a directory. Could this hook in somehow? -----Original Message----- From: Christopher Painter [mailto:chr...@deploymentengineering.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 4:09 PM To: General discussion for Windows Installer XML toolset.; wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [WiX-users] Best way to invoke Wix from a TFS build workflow? The simplest way is to use Votive to generate a .SLN / .WIXPROJ and then add the sln configuration | platform to to the build parameters in the build definition. You shouldn't have to do any customizations in workflow as the Default Template will work out of the box. Passing a ProductVersion property takes a little bit more work on the msbuild side ( build parameters and preprocessor definitions in the wixproj and wixs ) but it doesn't require any workflow changes. ---------------------------------------- From: "David Rickard (USA)" <davri...@microsoft.com> Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 5:11 PM To: "wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net" <wix-users@lists.sourceforge.net> Subject: [WiX-users] Best way to invoke Wix from a TFS build workflow? I need to build some MSIs with Wix during our TFS build. Our current TFS build is using the Windows Workflow XAML files to declare the build logic. What's the best way to invoke Wix from there? Directly invoking the process from an activity? Going down to a powershell script and calling it from there? Are there any custom Wix activities to use? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ All the data continuously generated in your IT infrastructure contains a definitive record of customers, application performance, security threats, fraudulent activity and more. Splunk takes this data and makes sense of it. Business sense. IT sense. Common sense. http://p.sf.net/sfu/splunk-d2dcopy1 _______________________________________________ WiX-users mailing list WiX-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wix-users
