How to upgrade from an old and unavailable version of Wix?

Question

I have to make a maintenance release of a project that hasn't been touched for a couple of years. Unfortunately, it requires Wix version 2.0.3719.0, which is no longer available and wasn't checked in or saved somewhere by the original developers.

Downloading the required version of Wix is difficult too because it apparantly moved away from Sourceforge and the releases archive of 2.x is now gone, so I have no way of getting it.

I'm thinking about several ways to deal with this:

• Creating a new installer from scratch, but it contains several non-standard screens, so it'll be quite some work (I have no experience with creating installers).
• Take the previous release of the project I'm working on and decompiling the installer using the current version of Wix.
• Upgrading the Wix source files to a version of Wix that is still available (I've managed to locate 2.0.2x, 2.0.5x and ofcourse the current versions) but they all generate errors that require more than small changes.

Anyone have similar experiences and advice on how to handle this?

Answer 1

Admittedly a guess but the best I can offer: Use the most recently available installer and deompile it with the current WiX toolset (your second option). Then modify as needed.

We used this approach not to upgrade from a previous version of WiX but to get away from a commercial tool that didn't meet our requirements any longer. Seems to be similar to your scenario.

Answer 2

You could try WixCop.exe to see if it'll translate to WiX v3: http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2009/7/7/Tips-on-how-to-upgrade-from-WiX-v2-to-WiX-v3.

Note: it is absolutely possible that your WiX v2 build is too ancient for WixCop.exe to get you there.

If that doesn't work, I'd probably go the dark (decompile) route. Or maybe just plow through the errors and fix the code to get to a supported WiX build.