How do you make a WiX project build when dependent files have changes?

Question

Hi,

I've adopted a Visual Studio solution that contains a number WiX projects. We build the solution from an MsBuild script to generate the product's installer msi.

The problem I'm experiencing is that if I build (and don't rebuild), even if exe's and dll's get updated that need to be put in the installer, the WiX build system doesn't seem to detect this and skips building the installer as it thinks it's already up to date.

How do I work out what the dependencies are that are needed to build a WiX project, and how do I tell the Wix build system to watch out for them changing so it knows to build instead of skip?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The WiX MSBuild targets don't currently support payloads as inputs into the build process, so nothing tells MSBuild that the WiX targets need to be called. Feel free to file a feature request at wix.sf.net; a couple of us have been talking about ways to do it.

Answer 2

If you can include the projects that create the exe's and dll's into the solution containing the wix projects, you can add project references from the wix projects to the appropriate application projects. Then wix should properly perform incremental builds.

I configure my wix projects to only be included in the release configuration so that the apps can be quickly built and run without creating the install in the debug configuration.