WiX 3.5 provides features to integrate with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010. But like many add-ins, since new files are being added they certainly can’t be in use by devenv.exe. So when we call devenv.exe /setup as part of our install, the changes may not show up in running instances of Visual Studio. To provide a better experience – and becaus...
The Windows Installer SDK ships a library named patchwiz.dll. This contains the logic to build a patch from pairs of database packages (.msi files, or simply MSIs) along with other configuration properties. Another tool that the SDK ships is msimsp.exe which uses patchwiz.dll and parses command line options. These tools consume an input file with t...
When testing the serviceability of your product before you ship, it’s important to test any conditions you might have on the product, features, components, and actions.Feature conditions can set the install level of a feature when the package is installed. But as the Condition table documentation states, be sure that the condition does not ev...
The Visual Studio 2008 RTM and SP1 detection keys are largely the same as the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 detection keys, and are documented below. But there is a caveat for released and upcoming versions: the shared detection value can be overwritten by an older installation of the same release.For example, if you installed VS2008 Professional, then in...
Since plans were made to ship WiX v3 in the box for Visual Studio 2010, the WiX working group has been working on fixing all outstanding bugs in the WiX v3 code base. Bob Arnson uploaded packages last week as a test on SourceForge and this week the following installation packages were uploaded on the v3 Beta release page. (The difference bet...
Windows Installer 4.5 is now available on the download center for a variety of platforms, including Windows XP SP2 and newer, Server 2003 SP1 and newer, and both Vista and Server 2008 RTM and newer.The Windows Installer 4.5 SDK is also available as a separate download, and the documentation has been updated on MSDN as well. You might noticed that t...
Yesterday I described an issue when adding new components to existing, not-installed (absent) features the feature tree is installed. This can lead to prompts for source or failed installations. One workaround is to add new, top-level hidden features. This works well unless new resources have a dependency on the older resources installed by the wou...
As Developer Division starts to ship patches for the Visual Studio 2008, some users are being prompted for installation source media. This is a resulting of Windows Installer needing the original source files if, for example, files are missing from disk when you repair your product or backup files are not available during patch install. If you are ...
Binder variables in WiX are variables that are resolved, coincidentally, at bind time. This is when the linker, light.exe, collects file information, assigns auto-GUIDs, and generates the output packages among other things. There are binder variables for all versioned binaries, and binder variables specific to both managed and native assemblies or ...
Patch families were introduced in Windows Installer 3.0 as a means to sequence patches even if applied in any order, and to supersede previous patches. Supersedence allows for easier delta patching and allows more patches to be installed than the 127 limit.When we started developing the new patch build support in Windows Installer XML (WiX) 3.0, we...
