Good resources for learning how to create MSI installers from WiX

Question

I've given up trying to apply lipstick to the pigs of installers that come out of VS and have decided to look at WiX.

What resources would you recommend to learn and reference?

(Note - this is not a which installer tech do you use question - its specific to WiX)

Answer 1

From first glance this seems fairly comprehensive

http://blogs.technet.com/alexshev/pages/from-msi-to-wix.aspx

Answer 2

• The wix tutorial is the #1 resource
• The people on the mailing list are very helpful
• I've found some useful hints on the wiki
• There's a codeproject article that might help
• Thre's a bunch of blogs, I keep bumping into Rob Mensching's
• I havn't read this but I found it in my bookmarks

Answer 3

Have to add [email protected]. That's where everyone hangs out and asks/answers questions as they come up. Just lurking on that mailing list will provide lots of real time education on the WiX toolset.

Answer 4

Even though it's not only related towards WIX, the book from APRESS:

The Definitive guide to Windows Installer By Phil Wilson link

Helped to understand the installation processes. It's a good book to have when writing installers.

Answer 5

If you understand german then read the articles in the "entwickler magazine".

Edition: 05/08, 06/08 and 01/09.

A follow up will be published in 02/09, with more developing stuff (MSI API).

Answer 6

One of the best ways I found to learn WiX was to take an existing MSI that did something I wanted to do, and used the Dark decompiler to generate a WiX script from it, and then I read that.

Answer 7

Here's a shameless plug to the book I've recently published through Packt:

WiX: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML

It covers a lot of what you'd need to know to get going using WiX 3.0.