Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.
Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
11–20 of 70 posts
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#12I remember having to use it at an employer many many years ago. The documentation was horrible and nothing was intuitive about the XML.
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#13Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.
Same, but I just gave up after 2 days. I really wish there was a one-click option in VS.net to create an installer that checks/pulls the required version of runtime, installs the target exe, all its DLL dependencies, and all custom files marked for release.
It's what 99.9% of apps need, so why is there no "do the defaults" path? You even need to pass things through the Heat generator to get multiple resulting files listed automatically. This is not an exclusive Wix issue though - no project offers that as far as I can tell and it really sucks.
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#14Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.
I wasn't able to figure it out. The docs [1] have absolutely no information or overview on how the tool works, or how you should get started with creating a simple installer. Besides setup instructions, it only has details on individual sub components, beginning with with "Burn bundles". All linked tutorials are for previous versions of WiX. Is the expected workflow that I read a v3 tutorial and then read the "v4 for v3 users" article (which immediately leaves me discouraged with "A lot about WiX has changed between v3 and v4"), or that I immediately purchase enterprise support?
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#15I remember having to use it at an employer many many years ago. The documentation was horrible and nothing was intuitive about the XML.
Yeah it's a thin layer over MSI tables, so if you don't already know how Windows Installer works then it's not at all clear how to do many seemingly-basic installer tasks. And few people really know how Windows Installer works because that is itself obscure, poorly designed and documented.
But a thin layer over MSI is actually what you want; the commercial tools that preceded WiX and tried to abstract away what Windows Installer was actually doing were much worse. Because Windows Installer is such a mess of counterintuitive design and bugs that you are going to need to debug it.
WiX is to be saluted for greatly reducing the level of misery involved in making installers for Windows. But the level of misery is still very high indeed.
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#16When Microsoft launched the (let's face it, baroque) complexity that is Windows Installer (MSI), we didn't get the WiX Toolset, instead we got an expensive proprietary profiling tool for capturing before/after snapshots, and an entry-level version bundled on the Windows 2000 CD which didn't really solve anybody's problem. No suprises then that the MSI format didn't immediately take over, and Microsoft would presume a…
I really tried to use msi back when it appeared but it wouldn't work in certain versions of Windows without installing something else before. I can't remember the details but it was self defeating.
Now the same thing happens with msix. Looks nice, but want to manage services through it? Only allowed on consumer editions, not on fairly recent server systems. Totally makes sense /s
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#17Needs a name change. Absolute no-go in Germany, because the name means "wank".
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#18Needs a name change. Absolute no-go in Germany, because the name means "wank".
But a different spelling
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#19Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.
Maybe we should try LLMs to generate documentation.
Re: Twenty years maintaining the WiX Toolset
#20Twenty years maintaining, but the quality of the documentation doesn’t show that. Making an installer in WiX 4 with only one or two fancy things required 3-4 days’ worth of trial-and-error, and searching the WiX sources to figure things out. The docs barely tell you anything.
I switched from wix to NSIS. It's not perfect but it's certainly a lot easier, and whatever problem you may have, the solution is usually only a Google search away.