I have tried to build a Wix MSI using our build server. I have set the build configuration in the Configuration manager to DEBUG/x86. All the other projects build correctly EXCEPT for the Wix Installer.
Initially there was an error requesting the latest version of WIX was installed on the build server "The WiX Toolset v3.11 (or newer) build tools must be installed to build this project. To download the WiX Toolset, see http://wixtoolset.org/releases/" so I follwed this -
https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/web_development/9781784393212/1/ch01lvl1sec12/compiling-a-wix-installer-on-a-build-machine-using-msbuild
also have used this -
https://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/msbuild/wix_with_team_build.html
Now the build freezes on the Wix project and eventually times oout at 59 minutes. What would be wrong? what needs correctling?
I have tried these suggestions already - https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/web_development/9781784393212/1/ch01lvl1sec12/compiling-a-wix-installer-on-a-build-machine-using-msbuild
also have used this -
https://wixtoolset.org/documentation/manual/v3/msbuild/wix_with_team_build.html
Expecting it to build, then I can create an MSI file.
.NET 3.5: This might very well be something else, but maybe try to install the .NET Framework 3.5. WiX 3.x has a build-dependency requiring this .NET version.
How-To: Please see this answer for more details: WiX Toolset: Creating a simple WiX project breaks in VS2017: The "CreateProjectReferenceDefineConstants" task was not found
Related
I have installed Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition. Installed it without any specific things selected like C++ development or Windows development etc. After that I have installed Wix through wixtoolset, which downloaded and installed wix tool set components. After that I have installed the Wix ToolSet extension for Visual Studio 2017. Restarted the Visual Studio and trying to create a new project through File -> New -> Project - WiX Toolset -> Setup Project.
It gives the error and does not let me create the project. I am totally new to WiX and have just a little knowledge about Visual Studio.
Initially, I did not select any of the Installation workloads for VS17 and installed it just to make the installation faster.
Through the comments from Azaz, I came to know that NuGet Package Manager is required to install the packages on demand. But since I could not see the NuGet option at all, I tried to install it with Extensions and updates but it did not work. I did a bit of research and found that at least one .Net development workload is required at a time of VS17 installation which will make the NuGet install automatically in VS17.
So I uninstalled the VS17, WiX at all and removed them from the system. Then Installed VS17 with certain workload packages as shown in the below screenshot.
After that I installed WiX and an extension for the same in VS17. i.e. Votive2017.vsix.
I restart the VS17 and now I am able to create project for WiX.
Looks like there is something I missed somewhere in installing which did not let me install required DLLs and GUID feature, which were important for creating project templates.
Sharing the steps I followed in order to fix the same issue that I found with Visual Studio 2019, as I also installed it without any workload. I was also looking at a reduced installation.
The steps I did in order to fix the template error, install the following individual components:
.NET 5.0 Runtime
.Net Core 3.1 Runtime
.NET SDK
C# and Visual Baisc Roslyn compilers
ClickOnce Publishing
Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects
Hope it helps someone else. I have to point out that the comments before helped me understand the issue. But, for example, I couldn't even open the NuGet command line.
I am very new to the installer world.
I have successfully made an .msi for my application and it is building with short-cuts and also uninstalls correctly.
My next goal is to package .Net 4.5 with the installer and have it be installed prior to the installation of my application.
I also have a third party application that needs to be installed. It is packaged as an msi.
From what I can gather I need to develop a Bootstraper solution to have these applications install in sequence.
Can anyone provide a guide as to how to implement an installer in such a way? My searches have come up with a bunch of partial implementations with an assumption of the design of a Wix Bootstrapper Project in Visual Studio.
I hope this helps someone. It took me 5 hours to figure it out. Maybe, my bad, but did not find anything about it in the docs or blogs.
So my scenario is: VS 2012, WIX 3.6 with Burn bootsrapper, create a Setup executable in order to check .NET Framework 4.5 and install it by downloading if not installed already. Sounds simple. And it is. Actually very.
Create your MSI installer project (WIX Setup Project), to produce an installer for your application.
Create a WIX Bootstrapper Project for your Setup executable.
Follow the instructions here, to create your Boundle.wxs
Add a reference to the WixNetFxExtension.dll which can be found in the WIX program directory.
Include the following line in your Chain:
<PackageGroupRef Id="NetFx45Redist"/>
Actually the WixNetFx extension contains a working install package definition for the .NET Framework 4.5.
As caveman_dick mentioned, Burn in WiX 3.6 supports this but you may also want to take a look at dotNetInstaller (http://dblock.github.com/dotnetinstaller/). We use it to install .NET 4.0 but I'm sure it works for installing 4.5 as well. It can also install other MSI dependencies very easily.
Is it possible to install both WiX 3.0 and 3.5? If I install 3.5 after installing 3.0, it removes the 3.0 files - and if I attempt to install 3.0 after 3.5, it tells me there is a newer version already installed.
I'm in the process of migrating from VS 2008 to VS 2010, so one version (branch) of my application is is using VS 2008 (existing production version), and another one is in VS 2010 (future version). WiX 3.5 is required for VS2010.
What this means is on my build server, at the moment, I cannot build both the current version and the new version, as one will report an error about not finding WiX files:
c:\buildAgent\work\fe55ddb47cebe4fd\MyApp.wixproj(25, 11): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\WiX\v3.0\Wix.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.
I'd prefer not to upgrade the current version of my product to WiX 3.5 as 3.5 is still in beta, and as is I had to cherry pick a weekly build to get it to work at all (I'm just hoping by the time my next version is ready, that WiX 3.5 will be stable).
Is there a way to install both side-by-side? Do I just need to copy the 3.0 files into the Msbuild directory?
I ended up:
Installing WiX 3.5.1916 with the .MSI package (later versions failed in strange ways which I didn't put much effort into figuring out)
Copying the following files to the build server:
%programfiles%\Windows Installer XML v3**
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Installer XML\3.0
(SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ for x64 systems)
%programfiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\WiX\v3.0**
It builds successfully now, I haven't done much testing with the resulting files though. So it seems it is possible to have 3.0 and 3.5 concurrently, it's just a minor pain to make it work.
The way wix is currently designed you can't have 3.0 and 3.5 both installed on the same machine. They do provide a zip version of wix that enables you to let your build automation self deploy wix onto the build server to get around this limitation. You do lose certain things like visual studio integration though.
I've adopted a Visual Studio solution that contains a number WiX projects. We build the solution from an MsBuild script to generate the product's installer msi.
The problem I'm experiencing is that if I build (and don't rebuild), even if exe's and dll's get updated that need to be put in the installer, the WiX build system doesn't seem to detect this and skips building the installer as it thinks it's already up to date.
How do I work out what the dependencies are that are needed to build a WiX project, and how do I tell the Wix build system to watch out for them changing so it knows to build instead of skip?
Thanks.
This facility was added to WiX 3.6 with little fanfare - in the WiX 3.6 release notes it simply says ".wixproj MSBuild projects support incremental build."
The WiX MSBuild targets don't currently support payloads as inputs into the build process, so nothing tells MSBuild that the WiX targets need to be called. Feel free to file a feature request at wix.sf.net; a couple of us have been talking about ways to do it.
If you can include the projects that create the exe's and dll's into the solution containing the wix projects, you can add project references from the wix projects to the appropriate application projects. Then wix should properly perform incremental builds.
I configure my wix projects to only be included in the release configuration so that the apps can be quickly built and run without creating the install in the debug configuration.
we are looking to automate an MSI generation for a product we are developing. Currently we have MSBuild building out the source to a network location, this is fine for testing but when it comes to releasing the software we will need to wrap it in an MSI.
The software is all .Net bar 1 COM component that will need registered on each machine it gets installed to.
What I was wondering was how to integrate Wix with MSBuild so that a new wix script will get generated along with an MSI that is able to handle fresh and upgrade installs.
Any help with this is very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Brendan
Sure, there are tasks in MS Build that can do all you need to build an MSI from WiX. Can you integrate this on a build / integration server?
Newer builds of Wix actually include a file called "wix.targets", which should get you started.
Also check out these fine articles on the topic:
Building with Wix.Targets (by Heath Stewart)
Wix Target for MSBuild (by Willem Meints)
Automate Releases With MSBuild And Windows Installer XML (by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi) (Web archive link for archived msdn magazine)
They cover the topic in much more detail and are extremely helpful to get started.
You should download and install Votive. This will create a Visual Studio project file which you can use with MSBuild to create a WiX-based MSI.
There is also a topic in the WiX manual about how to integrate with MSBuild called Using WiX with MSBuild.