Help with one step build all projects + installer (.NET + WiX)

Question

I have prebuild events on the installer to rebuild the projects with the appropriate configuration etc.

If I right-click build/rebuild on the WiX (3.0) project in visual studio it all builds fine, but if I try to run MSBuild on the wixproj file the pre-build events will throw errors.

I can instead call Candle and Light on the wixproj but it won't run the pre-build events.

The prebuild events rely on the macros provided by VS and I'm not sure how to get around that other than creating another project and basically just use the prebuild event of the project which just screams hack.

Another problem is that I need to feed in a self-updating version number into WiX from the command line.

I was planning on using just a csproj to handle the version number and updating it and just shelling to the MSBuild and Candle and Light, but the problem is that I don't know how to access the solution directory from code other than hard-coding it in

Answer 1

We found it easiest to use a utility to edit the project itself and to dump all the pre-build and post build events before we build it with our autobuilder (in our case VisualBuild).

This leaves us with a nice and juicy build process that doesn't rely on any nasty hacks in the IDE and give us full control over where source comes from and where built components go to.