windows-installerwix
I've given up trying to apply lipstick to the pigs of installers that come out of Visual Studio and have decided to look at WiX.
What resources would you recommend to learn and reference?
(Note – this is not a which-installer-technology-do-you-use question – it's specific to WiX.)
EDIT: Perhaps look at the answer currently immediately below.
This topic has been a headache for long time. I finally figured it out. There are some solutions online, but none of them really works. And of course there is no documentation. So in the chart below there are several properties that are suggested to use and the values they have for various installation scenarios:
So in my case I wanted a CA that will run only on uninstalls - not upgrades, not repairs or modifies. According to the table above I had to use
<Custom Action='CA_ID' Before='other_CA_ID'>
(NOT UPGRADINGPRODUCTCODE) AND (REMOVE="ALL")</Custom>
And it worked!
Creating multiple instances is pretty easy with WiX v3. You just use the InstanceTransform and Instance elements to create everything. Now, the bootstrapper problem requires something outside of the WiX toolset since we don't have burn, yet. I'm not sure we'll get this functionality in WiX v3.5 (with burn) but it is on our list for burn post v3.5.
Best Answer
WiX - Windows Installer XML(broken link), but I found it in my bookmarks