WIX MSBuild automation help - solution best practices

Question

I know there are many questions out there regarding this same information. I have read them all, but my brain is all turned around and I don't know which way to go. Plus the lack of documentation really hurts.

Here is my scenerio. We are trying to use WIX to create an installer for our application that goes out to our dealers for our product information. The app includes about 2000 images and documents of our products and a SQL CE database that are updated via Microsoft Sync Framework. The data changes so often that keeping these 2000 as content files in the app's project is very undesirable. The app relies on .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, SQL Server CE 3.5, Microsoft Sync Framework 1.0 and ADO.NET Sync Services 2.0.

Here are the requirements for the app:

• The dealers will be given the app on a CD every year for any updates (app or data updates).
• The app must update itself from the internet to get any new images, documents or data.
• The prerequisites must be installed if they do not exist on the client machine.
• The complete installer should be generated from an MSBuild script with as little human interaction as possible (we don't want to be manually updating the 2000+ file list).

What we have accomplished so far is that we have a Votive project in our solution. We have manually specified the binaries in a .wxs file. Web have modified the .wixproj file to use the HeatDirectory task to gather our data (images and documents and database) from a specified location (This is broken and giving an ICE38 error). This seems all right, but still is a lot of work. We have to manually update our data by running the program in release mode and copying it to the specified directory.

I am looking to see what other people would do in this situation.

1. How would you arrange your solution with regards to the 2000+ data files? Would you create a custom build script that gets the current data from the server or would you include them as content files in the main project?
2. How would you get WIX to include all of the project output (including the referenced assemblies) and all of the data files? If you have any complete samples, that would be great. All I have found are little clips here and there and not an entire example from start to finish.
3. How would you deal with the version numbers? Would you put them as a constant in the build script and reference them through the $(var.VersionNumberName)? Would you have the version number automatically picked up from the project being deployed? If so, How?

If there is any better information than what I am finding, please include. I have read numerous articles, blogs, Stackoverflow questions, the tuturial, the wiki, etc. Everything seems to be in bits and pieces. The tutorial is nice, but doesn't explain anything about MSBuild and Votive. I would like to see a start to finish tutorial on using MSBuild and Votive and all the WIX MSBuild targets. If no one knows of a tutorial like this I may put one together. I have already spent the entire week gathering info and reading. I'm new to MSBuild as well, so if anyone has any great articles on MSBuild, please include them.

Answer 1

I had a similar scenario and was unable to find a drop in solution so ended up with the following:

I wrote a custom command line program called wixgen.exe for generating wxs manifest files. It is pretty specific to our implementation in that it only knows how to create 2 types of wxs files. One for IIS Website/Virtual Directory deployments and another for Windows Service deployments.

Each time a build is triggered by our continuous integration server a post-build task runs wixgen with the right args to generate a new manifest.wxs for the project being changed. It automatically includes all the files needed for the deployment. These builds also version the dlls using a variation of the technique at: http://richardsbraindump.blogspot.com/2007/07/versioning-builds-with-tfs-and-msbuild.html

A seperate build which is manually triggered is then used to build the wixproj projects containing the generated wxs files and produce the msi's.

Answer 2

I would ditch the CD delivery (so 90's) and got with ClickOnce. This solution seems to fit well since you already use the .NET framework. With ClickOnce you should be able to just keep updating the content of your solution and make updates available to your heart's content. Let me know if you need, sample ClickOnce deployment code.

You can find more ClickOnce information here.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

Similar to dkackman's answer, you should seperate your build into several components, isolating build components to be built seperately.

I come from a mainly Java background, however for building MSIs and NET executables we use maven; with the 'maven-wix-plugin' plugin for building the installers, and using the NMaven plugin for compiling any NET code. However, as we're only performing very basic development in NET, with most development in Java, we don't need too much complexity from the NMaven plugin (which is probably a 'good thing' (TM) as it's only at version 0.17).

If you're a purely NET house, you could also look into Blydan (http://www.codeplex.com/byldan), which seems to be the focus of development there at the moment (it's the same team for NMaven and Byldan).

If you do want more information on NMaven or Byldan raise another question and I'll give as much info as I can (which is not a huge amount, as stated I only do very limited NET development).