Wix way should you go?

Now that I know Rob still reads my mostly stagnant blog, I guess it is the appropriate time to write a long-overdue post.

When I started working with Windows Installer technology, back when it was first introduced with Office 2000, I played around with customizing the package for the IT department to push out a customized version. The tools were quite primitive, the technology was new and largely unknown, and the concept of having blogs, yet alone Microsoft folks blogging, seemed completely foreign. Support was pretty much nonexistent, and much of the documentation was unintelligible. Fast-forward 10 years, and what a difference that makes! Today there are several free and low-cost repackaging tools for transitioning non-Windows Installer based setups to the MSI format, authoring tools, and lots of community support.

Most setup authoring tools have significant issues. Non-MSI or script based installations have issues because they encourage hacks - I can't tell you how many installations I encountered that install services by writing keys to the CurrentControlSet hive and forcing you to reboot merely so the Service Control Manager can pick up that addition. Furthermore, if you are targeting any sort of enterprise where more than one of your setups will be installed IT departments want MSI deployments for very good reasons. GUI based Windows Installer tools fail to do a good job of grouping related things into the same component, and dynamically adding a directory of files at build time breaks patching semantics horribly. Another big disadvantage to these tools lie in the setup author because he or she does not need to understand the underlying technology and can get away with "programming by coincidence" (as described in The Pragmatic Programmer).

I remember several paradigm shifts throughout my experiences with setup technology - nested MSIs, merge module distribution, and chaining installations. During this time the stock price of Rolaids likely skyrocketed. The biggest challenge was attempting to get developers to take a more proactive approach to deployment considerations as they were writing their code. One approach that I took was the use of merge modules - developers of feature-units would package their build output in an MSM that was consumed when building the final product. Using Visual Studio 2005+ with their deployment projects was not only difficult, but downright impossible because of how limited, shortsighted, and buggy deployment projects are. Adding custom actions to these modules involved a complex and convoluted post-build scripting process that nobody understood, but it DID move teams towards the direction of thinking of deployment while coding.

These days, the tag-team of MSBuild plus Wix 3.0 is THE enabler to accomplishing those goals and largely eliminating the disadvantages of the GUI-based tools. Since there is close to a one-to-one correlation of XML elements to the Windows Installer tables, it is quite simple to follow if you understand the underlying Windows Installer engine. To use WiX to author a complete installation, you MUST have an understanding of the Windows Installer engine. To make a few tweaks or additions once the basic skeleton of the installer is laid out, just about any developer can do it provided access to the WiX documentation. I have team members that are NOT setup developers add services, event log sources, and more with no official training.

Some of the more compelling points in favor of WiX is how you can use it to easily and properly make multiple product editions which share components, separate units of related components into their own WXS file(s) for easier understanding and maintenance, and integrate it easily as a first-class citizen into an MSBuild project. No other product is available to my knowledge that accomplishes those goals. Best of all - WiX is free, fast, and easily installable onto any developer machine.

If you are looking to switch authoring tools, take WiX for a test run by using the dark.exe decompiler to convert your existing MSIs and play around with it a bit. Subscribe to the WiX mailing list and ask a few questions. You just might like it.

Congratulations to Rob and the entire team and individuals who have contributed to it, as well as the community of developers who support it via the mailing list on a daily basis. If you are ever in Pittsburgh, let me know. I'll buy you a beer.