Problems with WiX and Visual Studio web deployment project

Question

Hello,

We want to create an .MSI package from a web deployment project in Visual Studio 2008. Now we want to use continuous integration and we would need the .MSI package build in the nightly builds.
Till now we used standard Visual Studio Web Setup project, but this is not compatible with the MSBuild. So we decided to use WiX.
The problem is that I have not found any good tutorial/documentation about this. Is there a way to do a WiX installer package from a web deployment project? If yes, how?
Also, I tried to use heat.exe to create the XML for the WiX project .wxs file, but it seems that heat.exe doesn't recognize the web deployment project format.

Thank you for your responses.
Regards,
V.

Answer 1

We used WIX on the installers for our last couple of projects and ended up regretting it. I would stick with the VS built-in projects and just invoke the VS IDE from the command line in the CI build.

Answer 2

You've probably long since found a solution for this, but to elaborate on Tom Cabanski's answer, you can invoke Visual Studio to build the msi on the command line using "devenv.com" via an external process from within your build. It's not a pretty as using msbuild, but it gets the job done. Below is an example of how to invoke Visual Studio:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" your.sln /build Release

Where your.sln is the solution file for the solution you wish to build, and Release is the configuration you wish to build, ensuring that the configuration you choose actually builds the vdproj project.

Following the successful execution, you can grab the msi from the appropriate configuration's bin, and do what you want with it.

I'd appreciate your response to this with your findings/approach, as I'm trying to decide whether to adopt WiX or InstallShield as the approach to building msi's for Web Applications within TFS Build, or to continue with the approach I just described. I haven't had to opportunity to try WiX out, and my very limited exposure to InstallShield suggests that this is far to involved for my need, which is to produce a simple deployment aid for some relatively straight-forward web applications to the company intranet via TFS Build.