The pain of the WiX

Much like the use of candles in BDSM play, I am feeling the pain of the WiX wax motif windows installer. But like those candles, I think it'll pay off in the long run.

Once again, into the depths of XML fun! At least it's not XML scripting languages at this point but I am definitely feeling the pain of heat, candle and not seeing the light at the moment. WiX has a very steep learning curve.

So far I've learned how to harvest a bunch of files with heat, link with candle and assemble a .msi with light. With a simple and straightforward project it's actually pretty simple but unfortunately I am not on a simple project.

The first thing that I've found that has burned me is that we have a bunch of duplicated DLLs nested in different subdirs that I want to package as a product and apparently that is a no-no and can't be done. I've had to separate the subdirs generated by MSBuild into two seperate trees with parallel structures and create two .msi packages that when executed create the desired tree.

I banged my head up against that for long enough.

Now I'm trying to figure out how to create a user and that is pretty painful. There is a most excellent older tutorial located here but it doesn't document all the gotchas. I'm trying to find the extra DLL I have to reference via -ext on the command line for candle.exe that recognizes the user tag.

Unlike the nant to MSBuild conversion (which I don't think it was necessary) I figure that learning this WiX stuff will pay off. I mean, if WiX was good enough for MS to deploy SQL Server 2005 and Office 2007 it should do everything I ever want. It's just the learning curve that has to be climbed.

I can really see why deployment/build engineering can be a full time position on a team. I don't want to be a full time build/deployment engineer but I appreciate the knowledge and suspect that it'll pay off in the long run.