Will Microsoft continue to use WiX in-house

Question

Microsoft announced that it will no longer provide a tool to create installation packages and officially recommends InstallShield.

Will Microsoft continue to use WiX in-house?

Answer 1

I think I can read the tea leaves on this one.

MSI and WiX isn't going away. A VP in DevDiv has said that InstallShield should be "a solution of choice" not "the solution of choice". There's two things at play:

1) How Microsoft will roll

They have enough stuff in house ( some of which shared with the world e.g. MSI/WiX and some that is not such as bootstrappers, external ui handlers, custom unicode multilingual and advanced patching strategies ) to be able to do everything they need to be to do. Various groups will leverage these capabilities to different degrees and some groups will actually still use outside tools such as InstallShield.

2) How the rest of the world will role

The world has MSI and anyone who wants WiX can have that to. If you are a Visual Studio user they are taking away Visual Studio Deployment Projects and offering you InstallShield 2010 LE Cripple / Ad-Ware. You can use that or you can spend money and upgrade to a more complete product. Or you can install WiX.

And let's not forget all the other competing solutions such as ClickOnce, MSDeploy, WebDeploy, Application Virtualization and so on. Clearly Microsoft and the Industry is all over the board with no unified agreed technology.