Rob asked me about why we/I use WiX in a comment on my post.. I started writing and couldn’t stop.. rather than have a nested reply… I thought I’d just make it it’s own post:

Our current run of installs were created with InstallShield. I think it makes for sloppy bloated MSIs and it allows people to get away with knowing as little about MSI as possible. It allowed people where I work to write jscripts for everything rather than knowing how to have MSI itself to what we wanted.

Then when we had new people install InstallShield our project files (MSI with extra tables and the extension switched to .ism) would corrupt and installshield would go into a looping crash randomly.

I think WiX is the better solution for a serious dev house. It’s making some of our developers have to stop slacking though. Unfortunately my managers have done a LOT of rolling over to make it easier for developers in the past, so it’s going to be a struggle to get them to start diong things right - currently we let them get away with not providing a file list, we just have to back engineer a “working machine” and look at build output and the occasional email notification.

My problem is I have suits waaaay up the line with no idea what’s involved in installs making demands. =(

I had written a C# app a while ago that would read an Xml file to do a quick 2 file one off web download update for them. Then they came to me and asked if I could extend that to do a major upgrade. I freaked out and managed to convince them that this really should be handled by MSI.. that it was an install. So I wrote a generic update framework in WiX and that was our proof of concept. (I emailed the mailling list about the escape characters in SQLScript bug and opened that).

So now they believe me when I say wix is the way to go (even though they want their dynamic file linking back because, as I said, they roll over for the devs.) So my project is to port the 4+ Nested MSI install we have into a single WiX build MSI. And I’m the only one doing it because my friend left.

But now I’m up to my eyeballs in C# code at the mono meeting… so I should get back to it.