Integrate Wix setup with application's debug folder

1
votes

I have a .NET application debug folder but not the complete visual studio solution. I am trying to generate a wix installer from this.

Things tried: I created a project called setup using WIX toolset. In my .net solution, there are now two projects, the main project helloWorld and the wix project setup. Inside the setup I added the reference of helloWorld and it worked fine. I am able to create the installer for my helloWorld project.

Here, I added the reference of the application project for which we want to generate the installer.

Problem:

As I have only application's - debug folder(i.e the application's .exe , .exe.config and other files) and not the complete visual solution. I am not able to generate the WIX installer from it.

Question:

  1. Is it possible to generate WIX installer from debug folder without having the complete visual studio solution?
  2. If possible, are there any document or things I can try?
1
c#visual-studiowixwindows-installer
Please elaborate. Not sure quite what you mean. – Stein Åsmul
@SteinÅsmul I have updated the question with more details – AP7

1 Answers

0
votes

Redistributing Debug Versions: Debug versions of applications should not be distributed. They require debug versions of runtime DLLs in order to run (not present on normal, non-developer computers), and they also contain a lot of debugging symbols and in .NET assemblies a lot of meta information that should generally not be sent to others. Debug dlls often have an extra "d" in their file name: mfcm140d.dll versus mfcm140.dll for example.

Hello WiX: With the above stated, adding debug dlls to a setup is no different from adding release files. There is a WiX Visual Studio Hello World example here. It should show you the basics of compiling a working setup with WiX and Visual Studio. There are also a bunch of quick start tips for WiX here (many links to samples).

Some Links: