Moving from WIX 3.5 to WIX 3.11.1 with Visual Studio 2017

Question

My project is just about to embark on a massive upgrade to our project, where we will be jumping from Visual Studio 2010 to Visual Studio 2017. Currently, our project's msi are built using Wix3.5.

As an experiement, we tried opening our solution with the current wix and it said that the wix projects are not compatible, which we sort of expected.

So, we installed wix 3.11, and opened the solution again, and it still said that there is a compatibility problem.

What we trying to understand here, is there an extra step that we are missing here that we need to perform on our wix projects that makes them compatible with the newer version of wix? If so, what do we need to do?

Answer 1

WiXCop: I have never used it for real work to be honest, but maybe have a look at WixCop: http://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/overview/wixcop.html.

WixCop has two main purposes: 1) To upgrade WiX authoring to the current schema, 2) To format WiX authoring according to a set of common formatting.

• Bob Arnson's WiX Cop piece here: http://www.joyofsetup.com/2008/03/26/wix-goodies-wixcop (straight from the horse's mouth - Arnson is a WiX developer).
• I have this previous answer on source migration issues: Migrating WiX. Do skim. There is a sample settings file inline in the answer.

WiX Source: If you post a WiX source somewhere that shows the problem I can take a quick look.