WiX 3: Using heat.exe to add bulk files to a new WiX project: HEAT5150

Question

If this is a repeat question, please direct me to the existing solution. I wasn't able to find a matching query.

We currently use InstallShield. I'm attempting to covert a project with 407 files to a WiX3 installation package. I tried using heat.exe to do some of the automation but I get the following warning for almost every file:

c:> heat dir "c:\projectDir\projectA" -gg -ke -template:Product -out "c:\install\projectA\heatOutput"

heat.exe: warning HEAT5150 : Could not harvest data from a file that was expected to be a SelfReg DLL: c:\projectDir\projectA\plugin1.dll. If this file does not support SelfReg you can ignore this warning. Otherwise, this error detail may be helpful to diagnose the failure: Unable to load file: c:\projectDir\projectA\plugin1.dll, error: 126.

Q: Is it normal for this warning to be reported for every file?

If there's a current "How To create/convert to your first WiX install project with many files" tutorial, please point me to it. The key requirement is "with many files".

Thank-you

-Karen Kwong-

PS. I know that WiX is designed for incremental install project creation but it would be nice to know if there's an automated way to convert existing install projects.

Answer 1

If there's a current "How To create/convert to your first WiX install project with many files" tutorial, please point me to it. The key requirement is "with many files"

You can take the msi file generated with installshield, and then decompile it with the dark.exe tool which comes with wix. As you can see in this diagram, dark.exe generates wxs files from a msi file.

You can use it like this:

dark installer.msi decompiled.wxs

See dark /? for more information.

edit: I don't use Votive, but AFAIK it should be able to handle the wxs files generated by dark. Did Votive show you an error?

edit2: wixproj files are just for visual studio and msbuild integration. The core tools don't know or use this format. Simply create a blank wixproj and add the wxs file to it from visual studio.

edit3: You should not compare the size of the wxs file to the msi file size. Like an installshield project file, a wxs does not contain the files to install. It only references them. Your installshield project file is not 70MB large either. If you want to extract the binary files from the MSI, then you should use dark.exe with the -x <path> switch.

Answer 2

Are you trying to extract data from x64 DLL's? That doesn't really work...