Visual Studio WiX and patches

Question

I tried to build a WiX patch with Visual Studio. Easy enough. I build with Visual Studio, and it builds. But, when I try to run the resulting MSI, I am told

This installation package could not be opened. Contact the application vendor to verify tat this is a valid Windows Installer package.

Ideally, I would be creating a much smaller msp path file, but, for sake of simplicity, I am OK with an MSI file. How do I do this with Visual Studio, or, do I need to drop down to the command line and use candle.exe, light.exe, torch.exe & pyro.exe?

The WiX code looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi">
    <Patch
          AllowRemoval="yes"
          Classification="Update"
          Comments="Some Patch for v 1.0.0"
          Description="Updates Some Software to v 1.0.1"
          DisplayName="Some software Patch 03/07/2011"
          Manufacturer="MyMfg"
          TargetProductName="SomeProduct">

        <Media Id="1000" Cabinet="Inspect.cab">
            <PatchBaseline Id="SomeBaseLine" />
        </Media>
        <PatchFamily
              Id="SomeFamily"
              Version="1.0.1.0"
              ProductCode="<GUID>"
              Supersede="yes">

            <ComponentRef Id="ComponentsToPatch" />
        </PatchFamily>
    </Patch>
</Wix>

Answer 1

Votive doesn't have a patch project type. The WiX MSBuild targets include a Torch task but not a Pyro task, so you can do everything with MSBuild but need to use Exec to run Pyro. There's an open feature request to support patching, both within Visual Studio and the MSBuild targets.