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I made a setup project on vs 2010 .net 4.0 for deployment of my product.The whole installations is based on my custom installer actions which i referenced in my setup project.

Now for some reason we have to migrate this setup project to WIX.

Is there a way that i integrate my previous made custom installer actions to WIX.

I searched here and googled as well but not found such stuff. Thank you.

SMK
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2 Answers2

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As long as you mentioned that the installation logic is primarily in custom actions, then the most appropriate way to move to another install software vendor can look like this:

  1. Examine the current installation project and list out every single action it does, for instance:

    • install files to the XXX folder
    • write the values to the YYY registry key
    • modify the configuration files the ZZZ way
    • etc.

  2. When you have this list ready, refer to the very basic tutorial / user guide of the toolset you're moving towards. For WiX, I can recommend this tutorial, this book or a number of How To articles in the WiX.chm which is installed together with the WiX toolset.

  3. Create the empty project and start building your installer from scratch, following the list you created in the point 1.

IMPORTANT: you should use custom actions AS SELDOM AS POSSIBLE. Think of those as the last resort. First, examine whether your requirement can be satisfied with the standard capabilities of WiX or Windows Installer (the underlying technology). Search how people achieve this or that with Windows Installer. If not, search for ready-made custom actions - e.g. standard custom actions in the WiX toolset, or third party. If you didn't find anything, then you can turn to writing your own. But even in this case there are best practice techniques how to make the action less error-prone.

Yan Sklyarenko
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Your best option here is to use dark to decompile your existing msi into a wxs file and then use that as a basis for your new project.

dark.exe InputInstaller.msi OutputFile.wxs

Dark is included in the wix installation.

caveman_dick
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  • Dark will give you *everything* in the MSI, including the UI, etc. It won't use anything from WiX like UI extensions; you'll have to wade through that and replace if you want to to use the include WiX UI, for example. – Peter Ritchie Jul 26 '12 at 20:37