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i am currently working with wix in combination with visual studio 2013. bud there is something i just dont seem to get working. i am building an installer (.MSI) which means i need to add files to it, of course i dont want to do it al by hand so i am trying to use heat.exe for it bud was not succesful up to this moment.

i have tried the following: i made a system variable that points to the location of the files. i put that system variable in the command as described in the Wix documentation:

heat dir ".\MySystemVariableName" -gg -sfrag -template:fragment -out directory.wxs

i inserted this command in the pre-build command line, also i selected suppress ICE validation. when i build the project it returns error 9009, i couldnt figure out why or what the problem was so i followed a tutorial on youtube.

in that tutorial another command was used:

“$(WIX)bin\heat.exe” dir “$(SuperFormFilesDir)” -cg SuperFormFiles -gg -scom -sreg -sfrag -srd -dr INSTALLLOCATION -var env.SuperFormFilesDir -out “$(ProjectDir)Fragments\FilesFragment.wxs”

in the video it was stripped down to this:

 “$(WIX)bin\heat.exe” dir “$(MySystemVariableName)” -cg MySystemVariableName -gg -scom -sreg -sfrag -srd -out “$(ProjectDir)\FilesFragment.wxs”

when i build the project with these changes it returns two errors:

  1. startindex is not allowed to be bigger than the lengt of the character-array.
  2. the command "commando..." exited with code 1.

the first error is a mystery to me and the second is an error that has a huge ammount of potential problem that could cause this error.

i am realy struggeling with it, my knowledge of Wix is almost 0 since i am using it for the first time and my program skills are by far not sufficient to solve it on my own.

link to the video for the people who are interested.

thanks in advance.

F.J
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  • i solved the problem. the information in the tutorial was not 100% ( maybe he used an older version of wix) bud i had to add some extra arguments to get it working. however i got another question now, does this only define the directory structure or does it also add the files in the installer package? and do i have to manualy assign al the installation locations or are there tools or other methods to do this more efficient? – F.J Jun 04 '15 at 13:09
  • I suggest that you post the steps you made as an answer to your own question, so that in the future, people looking for the same problem as you can find it. If you have follow up questions, open a new question. – Marcos Dimitrio Jun 24 '15 at 17:46

1 Answers1

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I had the same problem with a default WIX installation (v3.11 in my case) If anyone wants to know how I fixed it, here it is.

You need to add the bin folder of your WIX installation in the path variable of your environment variables.

Example of Path Environment for WIX

Jeremy Caney
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Denarius
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