Is it possible to avoid local installation and use flat files for WiX?

Question

Background:

I always try to ensure the following tenent in my projects:

After a fresh checkout a developer should be able to do all project related tasks with solely the contents of the combined folders.

Obviously, this isn't always possible (e.g. Visual Studio for Windows development). However, I really dislike having to install any third-party libraries or tools that are specific a project like log4net, NHibernate, NUnit, etc. There are number of reasons for this including:

• For a given development machine, you may work on several different projects, all which leverage different versions of the same third-party library or tool.
• Minimizing the environment setup requirements makes setting up new developers or machines much easier
• Facilitates easier maintenance of automated builds

Assumptions/Contraints

• I am currently using WiX 3 beta, but if there is way for either 2.0 or 3.0 please respond
• I am using Visual Studio 2005
• The IDE syntax highlighting is not a requirement.

Question:

Is it possible to avoid local installation of the WiX toolset and use flat files instead? If so, please explain how.

See Also:

Answer 1

I know with WiX 2, you can just download the executable files and the dll's to whatever directory your project is in. Then you create a .bat file to run candle.exe and light.exe with the parameters you need to build your installer.

That way, all your projects can have their own version of WiX with a disk drive hit of only about 4 megs each.

I'm not positive, but I think you can do the same with WiX 3.

Answer 2

First, build your WiX installer:

• Create a new WiX Installer Project in Visual Studio 2005.
• Build your WiX XML accordingly.

Now, to integrate the WiX toolkit into your source tree:

• Copy c:\Program Files\Windows Installer XML v3\bin to a sub-directory in your source tree. I used WiX\bin relative to my .wixproj file.
• Copy c:\Program Files\MSBuild\WiX\v3.0\ to a subdirectory in your source tree. I used WiX\v3.0 relative to my .wixproj file.
• Either add the following code or replace the line that follows:

<WixTargetsPath Condition=" '$(WixTargetsPath)' == ''>$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\WiX\v3.0\Wix.targets</WixTargetsPath>

With the following lines:

<WixToolPath>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\WiX\bin\</WixToolPath> <WixTasksPath>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\WiX\v3.0\WixTasks.dll</WixTasksPath> <WixTargetsPath>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\WiX\v3.0\Wix.targets</WixTargetsPath>

As you can see, the WixToolPath, WixTasksPath and WixTargetsPath directives reflect the location of the folders I've instructed you to copy.

• Rename your .wixproj to .csproj. This ensures that Visual Studio does not get confused by the .wixproj file but because the .wixproj is a valid MSBuild project, Visual Studio will be able to work with it.

Using this method, the WiX directory as described is about 9MB large.