Visual-studio – WiX – Create MSI using msbuild

The key is to isolate the different types of complexities into separate merge modules and put them altogether into an MSI as part of the build. That way things that change often can change without impacting things that hardly change at all.

1) For the data files:

We use Paraffin to generate the WiX and hence the merge modules for an html + Flash based help system consisting of thousands of files (I can't convince the customer to go to CHM).

Compile these into a merge module all by themselves.

2) Assemblies: assuming that this is a set that changes less often just make a merge module by hand or with WixEdit with the correct files and dependencies.

3) For the version number there a lot of ways to manage this depending on your build system. The AssemblyInfoTask is pretty straight forward way to make sure all your assemblies are versioned appropriately. The MSBuild Extension Pack has some versioning stuff if you are using TFS.

The "MSBuild ILMerge task" (or MSBuild.ILMerge.Task) NuGet package makes this process quite simple. It defaults to merging any "copy local" references into your main assembly.

Note: Although the packages have similar names, this one is different from ILMerge.MSBuild.Tasks that Davide Icardi mentioned in his answer. The one I'm suggesting here was first published in August 2014.