WIX installer - Copying Assembly of a unreferenced plugin project into the web application bin folder

Question

I'm new to WIX installer and would appreciate if someone could help me solve the below issue.We have a web application where we load plugin assembly(non referenced) using reflection and a web deployment project which merges all the assemblies in to a single one. In the webdeployment project file there are couple of lines which generates the "ProjectWebFiles.wix" source file when built.

<PropertyGroup>
...........
<WixDirectoryId>ProjectWebFolder</WixDirectoryId>
<WixComponentGroupId>ProjectWebFiles</WixComponentGroupId>
</PropertyGroup>

We have a WIX installer project which creates msi installer from this wix file and we want the web application project bin folder to have the unreferenced assembly when the application is installed using msi.

One solution is we could add the project as a static reference to the web project but we want to keep that as a last option since we have to build the web project everytime the plugin project is modified.

Can this be achieved by modifying the web application deployment project file ?

Answer 1

That is MSBuild syntax, not WiX syntax, so I'm not exactly sure what you are asking for. If you are just trying to get all the files from another project or directory, then take a look at the HeatProject task and/or HeatDirectory task.