Files must be contained in a Component element, which is the smallest unit to be installed. That is, if you have a component containing files and you install that component, all of its contained files are installed. Conversely, if that component is not installed, none of the files are installed. Creating components that contain a large number of files is not recommended.
Components are always contained in a Feature element and can be contained in more than one feature. A feature is a set of components and potentially of sub-features. If your installer has a graphical interface that allows the user to select which items to install, they are actually selecting features. If IntelliSense is not enabled when you are editing a WiX source file using Visual Studio, all you have to do is copy the wix.
Visual Studio has a tool that you can use for this purpose, and there are Visual Studio macros available so you can assign a shortcut to directly insert a new GUID as well.
Now let's start by creating a new WiX source file. The first element is always going to be a Wix element. The type of desired output will drive which of these you will use. The beginning of the WiX v2 source file, Sedodream. As you can see ,the Product element has many attributes, the most important of which are Id and Name.
The Id is used to uniquely identify the product. You must change this for a new major release. You should also make a note of its value for later reference. The first child of the Product element, the Package element, is shown here as well. Notice that the Id attribute contains a series of? By using this syntax, the code specifies that the Id should be generated at build time.
When you are creating installers, you want the Package Id to be different for each installer created, even from one build to the next. Almost every installer will place at least one file onto the target machine, and this installer is no different. Since WiX uses a declarative approach, I'll declare what the directory structure is and that will be recreated on the target machine.
I do this using a series of Directory elements:. The Media element in this sample specifies that a cabinet file will be generated and placed into the installer database. This is a required element, and if you have installations spanning more than one medium you can have more than one. For example, if you are distributing your application on a CD, but it needs to span over multiple discs.
In most cases, you won't have to worry about this issue. Following Media is the series of Directory elements. The first Directory element will be a virtual element that simply encapsulates the other entries. As you may have guessed, this is a well-known location and Windows Installer will set its value when launched.
There are other system folders you can use; a complete list is available from msdn. These system properties always resolve to their full paths. The next elements provide names of custom directories. The directory will be named using the LongName attribute if possible; otherwise the Name attribute is used. If those directories don't exist, Windows Installer will create the appropriate one at install time. After you declare your directory structure, it's time to start creating Component declarations.
As noted earlier, the smallest unit that can be installed is the component, which can consist of many different items including files, shortcuts, registry keys, and certificates.
Design your components so they are independent of each other. That is, when you install or uninstall a component there should be no adverse effect on other components. Inherently this means that items should only be contained in a single component. If that's not the case, you may want to reconsider how your components are organized. It's not unusual for a component to contain only a single file. It is very important to ensure that none of your component GUIDs repeat.
Figure 2 shows a component from the sample WiX source file. You can see that it contains four File elements and two XmlFile elements. The File element is simply a reference to a file that needs to be placed on the target device. It inserts a new element into the Microsoft. Features are the items that the user will select for installation if your installer shows a UI.
Here are the Feature declarations from the sample project:. Like many other WiX elements, the Feature element has many possible attributes, some of the more commonly used ones are described in Figure 4. In this WiX snippet the main feature, Complete, contains a reference to two components and a sub-feature. The sub-feature references are achieved by a child Feature element.
The WiX source file can contain as many of these as necessary. The component reference uses a ComponentRef element. When using the ComponentRef element you have to use the same ID value that is used in the Component element you are trying to reference. In the latest releases for WiX v2 you'll find a wix.
Those tasks are all contained in the WiXTasks. The way in which you'll build installers is very similar to how managed projects are built now. For example, when creating a C project, your project file will contain all the necessary properties and items to build the project, but all the steps to build the project are contained in the Microsoft.
This file is included into the project file with the MSBuild Import element. For WiX, your project file will define all necessary properties and items and then include the wix.
Figure 6 provides a list of the minimum declarations required to successfully build an installer using wix. To create the installer you need to create an MSBuild file to define the required properties and items. This file is shown in Figure 7. As you can see, there's not much to this MSBuild file, just a few properties and a lone item defined.
The file assumes that a WiX source file, Sedodream. The WiX file also makes some assumptions about where files are placed.
For now let's assume that all the files are where they need to be. To build the installer I will need to invoke MSBuild on the project file. I open the Visual Studio command prompt, navigate to where the file resides, and execute the following command:. Since I didn't define a target to execute, the DefaultTargets were executed, and this was defined to be Build in the Sedodream.
From the output you can see that a file named ReleaseSedodream. At this point you can execute the installer to ensure that it works as expected. Before continuing with our main goal, I will cover an advanced MSBuild topic, batching, in the next section. This is necessary because batching is used throughout the process that will build the product and its release. When using MSBuild you'll discover that there is no looping construct to be found.
In place of a loop you can employ batching, which uses item metadata to break items into different categories called batches or buckets that consist of one or more items. Once the items are separated you can iterate through each batch.
This is used throughout the build process for managed projects. With Visual Studio and later, it's installed under the Visual Studio installation folder.
For a typical default installation on Windows 10, MSBuild. In the installer, make sure MSBuild tools for the workloads you use are selected, and choose Install.
With Visual Studio , it's installed under the Visual Studio installation folder. It is automatically selected when you choose any of the other workloads to install. Another way of getting MSBuild is to install the. This makes it easy to create a new project file using Visual Studio.
In this section, you create a Visual C project file. You can choose to create a Visual Basic project file instead. In the context of this walkthrough, the difference between the two project files is minor. In the search box, type winforms , then choose Create a new Windows Forms App. NET Framework. In the dialog box that appears, choose Create. In the Project name box, type BuildApp. Then choose OK. In the Name box, type BuildApp.
In the previous section, you used Visual Studio to create a Visual C project file. The project file is represented in Solution Explorer by the project node named BuildApp. You can use the Visual Studio code editor to examine the project file. All project files are named with the suffix proj. If you had created a Visual Basic project, the project file name would be BuildApp.
Project files are XML-formatted files with the root node Project. If the project is not an SDK-style project, you must specify the xmlns namespace in the Project element. If you don't know the MSBuild version, you can get it from the first two numbers from the output of the following command line for example, The work of building an application is done with Target and Task elements.
A task is the smallest unit of work, in other words, the "atom" of a build. Tasks are independent executable components which may have inputs and outputs. There are no tasks currently referenced or defined in the project file. You add tasks to the project file in the sections below. For more information, see the Tasks topic.
A target is a named sequence of tasks. For more information, see the Targets topic. The default target is not defined in the project file. Instead, it is specified in imported projects. The Import element specifies imported projects. For example, in a C project, the default target is imported from the file Microsoft.
In SDK-style projects, you don't see this import element, since the SDK attribute causes this file to be imported implicitly. MSBuild keeps track of the targets of a build, and guarantees that each target is built no more than once.
Add these lines to the project file, just after the Import statement or the opening Project element. This creates a target named HelloWorld.
Notice that you have IntelliSense support while editing the project file. The Message task is one of the many tasks that ships with MSBuild. For a complete list of available tasks and usage information, see Task reference.
The Message task takes the string value of the Text attribute as input and displays it on the output device or writes it to one or more logs, if applicable. If you choose to publish to a Web server, you can tell MSBuild to generate a versioned.
The generated HTML file includes a hyperlink prefixed with the browser-agnostic ms-appinstaller protocol activation scheme:. If you set up a release pipeline that publishes the contents of the drop folder to your intranet or any other Web site, and the Web server supports byte-range requests and is configured properly, your end users can use this link to directly install the app without downloading the MSIX package first.
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