Creating WiX projects from MSI using dark

Question

We have a solution, there are about 100 hundred projects in it. And we have around 20 installers which we created with vdproj.

I need to create WiX projects, which would create .msi instead of vdproj. I used dark.exe to generate wxs file out of msi and got binaries out of it. I successfully created an msi file and everything was good.

But then I started thinking about it. If some of these projects are changed, will those changes be applied to the application after rebuilding of wix project? Or wxs will be referencing the old version and to update it someone will have to rebuild vdproj project to create new msi, then use dark.exe again?

I am sorry for a stupid question, it's my first time using wix and working with installers in general.

Thank you in advance

Answer 1

You've started on the right track. The VDPROJ outputs are .msi files, so using dark to convert those to wxs files is the right thing to do. Now that you have your wxs files (the base source file to build wix deployments), you can do away with the VDPROJ projects in your solution and only update and use the wxs files (I believe WiX has a visual studio project template available as well).

You'll have to update you wxs files with new assemblies or deliverable files as your projects change.

It is better this way then doing a wildcard pickup (something you can't technically do with WiX, anyway) as having explicit control of what goes on the target machine is preferred. I've seen many cases where developers carelessly add a reference as build output that isn't needed, and sometimes that reference cannot be redistributed per the license agreement or other legalities.