9

I currently have a Visual Studio Deployment project for creating an MSI for my applicaiton, and I'm porting over to a WiX installer. The VS Installer used a library with Custom Install Actions that inherited from System.Configuration.Install.Installer, e.g.:

[RunInstaller(true)]
public partial class MyCustomInstaller: Installer
{
}

How do these equate to Wix actions? I figure that in general, WiX allows you to run custom actions after an install. Are these just executables? In my case, the custom Install Actions I have are classes in a DLL, not an EXE. How can I execute these from my WiX configuration?

Stealth Rabbi
  • 10,156
  • 22
  • 100
  • 176

1 Answers1

5

The Installer class based custom actions do not integrate well with the Windows Installer. The Visual Studio Setup Projects created a workaround to shoehorn them into an .MSI file but that was never the ideal situation. The WiX toolset provides true support for managed custom actions using the DTF framework.

I highly encourage you to take a look at the DTF Documentation shortcut provided with the WiX toolset. It has decent walkthroughs and I expect you'll be able to port your code pretty easily plus you'll be able to integrate far more with the Windows Installer.

Rob Mensching
  • 33,834
  • 5
  • 90
  • 130
  • I'm looking at the DTF wix documentation. It references projects in Samples\Managed CA directory, yet I have no such diretory. I downloaded the wix 3.7 linked from wixtoolset.org to here: http://wix.codeplex.com/releases/view/99514. I downloaded the exe and the sources, and do not see any example projects. – Stealth Rabbi May 20 '13 at 12:45
  • 1
    Look in the `src\DTF` folder. That is where all the DTF code is rooted. – Rob Mensching May 20 '13 at 14:14