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Tag: wix

Refreshing Component Guids in your Wix XML

July 14, 2010 Right now I am working once again with Wix which can be quite shall we put it nicely: freaking traumatic. I promise this post will not entirely be me moaning about Windows Installer crap-titude. Rather, this post may actually help you out of a weird jam some day. My Windows Installer (.msi based) installed application started to refuse to uninstall with a weird error. Registry Component<GUID><GUID> could not be found. The only resulting way for me to get rid of the install was to use the Windows Install Clean Up which is pretty scary because Microsoft doesn’t provide it as a download because: While the Windows Installer Cleanup utility resolved some installation problems, it sometimes damaged other components installed on the computer. Because of this, the tool has been removed from the Microsoft Download Center. Yikes! Anyhow. The reason this…

Adding a Custom Dialog To Your Wix Installer

November 4, 2009   Recently I made the move to Wix3 for a couple of projects and I have been quite happy. One of the things that has been simplified is adding a a custom step into the installer process.   I’ll leave the heavy lifting of how to insert the custom dialog to Jan Schepens’ post Making a custom setup dialog using WiX 3.0. He tells you how to customize your UI layout and insert a new dialog into the process. Read this post it explains it well. Neil Sleightholm has a similar post Customised UI’s For Wix that is about removing dialogs from the layout.   I’m going to be straight with you. This post is mainly for myself. I want to have this resource six months from now when I need to do the same thing again. Wiring Up Your…

Creating Windows Installers: Web Applications and Virtual Directories

December 12, 2007 So far on our journey into building windows installers we have gone from just getting started to generating Wix content for all the files in your application. There is an important little something something missing from our toy installer. Pleats (fake product of Pants Enterprises) is supposed to be a web application that runs on IIS. It would be great to add support in the installer to create a virtual directory for the web application. With Wix this is quite easy. Here we go. A virtual directory for your web application   I like to compartmentalize my units of install where practical. Because having the installer integrate with IIS and create a virtual directory is completely different than copying files I feel that this piece of the install belongs in its own component.     The XML above is declaring that a virtual…

Creating Windows Installers : Generating Wix XML using Tallow

December 10, 2007 Now that our journey has begun and we have a basic Wix installer under our belt, we need to get the rest of our web application's files into the installer. Creating all the <Directory> and <Component> and <File> elements by hand gets very tedious especially if you have a lot of directories and files in your projects. Thankfully there is a utility included with Wix called Tallow that takes care of most of the busy work for you. In this post I will show you how to use Tallow against your release folder to do a one time generation of Wix XML for your project. Don't have a release folder yet? Let's begin with automating the creation of one. Build Your Release Folder   Here is some NAnt build automation that copies files to a release folder. The layout of the files in…

Creating Windows Installers Using WIX: The Journey Begins

December 7, 2007 We all use them. Installers. They help get that sexy, shiny, new software safely onto our PCs and into our lives letting us frolic and play. Later, if things go sour or if the thrill is gone the installer is still there to reverse the process to help arbitrate the separation and keep what's yours intact. Recently I needed to make an installer for a web application product we have called Bolt. Dovetail's own Gary Sherman created Bolt and it was good. It is a great too if you are a Clarify developer. Exciting things are in store for Clarify users regarding Bolt but I can't steal that thunder. Creating the installer for Bolt made me realize I have a lot locked up in my head about deploying software. This is the first in a series of posts that are…