WiX Cookbook

260 Pages·2015·2.93 MB·English

by  Nick Ramirez

WiX Cookbook
Over 60 hands-on recipes packed with tips and tricks to
boost your Windows installations
Nick Ramirez
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
WiX Cookbook
Copyright © 2015 Packt Publishing
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First published: January 2015
Production reference: 1230115
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78439-321-2
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Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Nick Ramirez Milton Dsouza
Reviewers Proofreaders
Jiří Činčura Ameesha Green
Chris Eelmaa Elinor Perry-Smith
Christopher Painter Jonathan Todd
Ranjith Sundarrajan
Indexer
Tejal Soni
Commissioning Editor
Amarabha Banerjee
Production Coordinator
Shantanu N. Zagade
Acquisition Editor
Owen Roberts
Cover Work
Shantanu N. Zagade
Content Development Editor
Susmita Sabat
Technical Editors
Shiny Poojary
Sebastian Rodrigues
Copy Editors
Roshni Banerjee
Pranjali Chury
Puja Lalwani
Gladson Monteiro
Jasmine Nadar
Adithi Shetty
About the Author
Nick Ramirez is a software developer living in Columbus, Ohio. As a believer that
deployment shouldn't be terrifying, he has become a big fan of technologies such as
WiX. His other related interests include build automation, software architecture,
and playing Minecraft. Nick lives with his wife and two cats.
I would like to thank the editors at Packt Publishing for making the process
of writing so much easier. They are superb at keeping things on track and
well organized. A big thanks goes to all those involved in the WiX community
for continuing to pour vitality into the project and keeping the discussions
going. There are many tireless volunteers who are always there to answer
a question or start a discussion. Those developers who contribute source
code to the WiX project deserve an extra bit of thanks for the hard work that
they do. Because of them, WiX continues to be the best deployment tool in
the market.
About the Reviewers
Jiří Činčura is an independent .NET developer who focuses on data access layers and
business layers as well as language constructs and databases. He is a project lead for ADO.
NET, provider for the Firebird project, and Entity Framework support maintainer for the NuoDB
database. He also creates custom large applications for various customers in Europe as
well as companies from other countries. He conducts trainings and consultations about new
technologies to provide customers the best information possible, to deliver applications in
a shorter time and with better maintainability. When he's not programming or teaching,
he spends time participating in ultra races.
Chris Eelmaa is a software engineer from Estonia, who has experience with a lot of
different languages and technologies, some of which include C#, C++, WPF, WiX, and
AngularJS. He works as a freelancer and contractor, interested in getting involved with
projects that involve WPF and MVVM.
He is very keen on solving challenging problems and likes to understand exactly how or why
something works; this has kept him in the engineering industry for over 8 years.
In his spare time, he likes to read about self-growth and meet similar people who aspire to
grow. Chris also blogs at http://chriseelmaa.com.
Ranjith Sundarrajan is a father of a lovely daughter, Rachna, and a lucky husband to
Vidya, a technologist at heart and an information scavenger. In his spare time, he enjoys
asking "why" questions and finding an answer for them, and listening to different genres
of music.
In the technology world, he is currently a technology expert at Tesco. He joined
Tesco (www.tesco.com) as a developer in 2008 with a bachelor's degree from
St. Joseph's College, Bangalore, and a master's degree in computer applications
from BMS College, Bangalore.
He preaches writing quality code in the team and works extensively on .Net Compact
Framework technologies, MS SQL Server, CI/CD, and TIBCO.
Being detail-oriented and data-driven, Ranjith is very passionate about technology and highly
committed to providing quality solutions and products.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Organizing and Building WiX Projects 7
Introduction 7
Installing WiX and creating a new project in Visual Studio 2013 8
Referencing the output of a .NET console application in a WiX project by
using a preprocessor variable 11
Separating a portion of WIX markup into its own library 15
Compiling a WiX installer on a build machine using MSBuild 19
Building a WiX installer from the command line 23
Chapter 2: Installing Files and Directories 27
Introduction 27
Installing directories onto the target computer 28
Adding a file to a directory 31
Installing a 64-bit executable file to Program Files 33
Including one component or another depending on the condition 37
Using the heat.exe tool to generate components 40
Chapter 3: File and Folder Permissions 45
Introduction 45
Changing the permissions on a folder for a user 46
Changing the permissions on a file for a user 49
Marking a file as read only 51
Creating a file share 52
Setting the default program for a file type 56