WiX v3.0.4116.0 was released on Friday, 16-May-08. You can download it from http://wix.sourceforge.net/releases/3.0.4116.0/.
New features
- DTF, a framework for accessing the Windows Installer API from managed code and for writing managed-code custom actions, is now included in WiX. Wait, managed-code custom actions?! Yep. For details, see Rob’s announcement and Jason’s history-of-DTF post.
- WixFirewallExtension, a compiler extension and set of custom actions for registering firewall exceptions on Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003SP1, Windows Vista, and Windows Server 2008.
- By default, files now get the “vital bit” (msidbFileAttributesVital).
- New properties in WixNetFxExtension allow detection of the Windows SDK: WINDOWSSDKCURRENTVERSIONDIR, WINDOWSSDKCURRENTVERSION, WINDOWSSDK60ADIR, WINDOWSSDK61DIR.
4 Comments
Hi Bob,
This is not really a comment about this post, but more of a general question about a comment you made in another group - which I now cannot find…..
Q. Is it possible to generate a wixobj (or other type of file) that is a linkable fragment of a database with files, etc. included? If yes, how?
Almost 10 years ago we wrote a system to support distributed development & suites of products that used a homegrown textmsi/msm tool.
It depends heavily on msm-based fragments that are kicked out by build systems from multiple teams and consumed by multiple installer build systems (which use IMSMMerege and msidb.exe along with custom tools).
We now have over 500 of these fragments that don’t meet the strict definition of a WiX MSM but we’d like to move away from our legacy system.
We are currently using WiX 3.0 and have been quite successful with it, but it still consumes our ‘legacy pseudo-MSMs’.
We’d like to used dark or some similar tool to convert them from our sql based archive to WiX XML without converting them to full MSMs (too much work).
Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Jim Stout - Attachmate Corp (formerly WRQ, Inc.)
You can use the lit tool to combine one or more .wixobj files into a .wixlib and use the -bf switch to bind the files the .wixobj(s) refer to into the .wixlib. That gives you the equivalent of a merge module without all the problems of modularization GUIDs and such.
Suggestion for a blog topic (sorry, no email addy so I’m leaving it here): Automating install after successful build. I’d like to do this so that my wix install package is run after my QA release build completes each night. That way there’s a fresh install ready on the test web server for acceptance testing the next day.
Most MSI packages can be installed by automation using the /qb or /qn switches. But there’s definitely more that can be done in tools for test automation.
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