I have a dll project which I need to install into the GAC, on our Production machines.
(I wish I didn't have to use the GAC but SSIS insists)
gacutil.exe is not available on the target machines and using "Enterprise.Services" from PowerShell does not work (I don't know why)
My understanding is I should created a msi installer project.
However after installing the Setup and Deploy Extension to Visual Studio (2015 soon to be 2017), I discovered those projects cannot be built by our Build Server because it uses MSBuild, and MSBuild can't build vdproj project files.
What is the correct way, using a CI build pipeline (MSBuild), to create build artifacts, which can install dlls to the GAC, of a Production Environment?
Note: there are several partial answers on SO, but I could not find any, which were up to date/answer my whole question. Please keep that in mind when answering.
You need to break this down into several user stories. You aren't finding partial answers, you are finding actual answers for specific questions. What you ask is more like an epic.
In general I would create an MSI using Windows Installer XML. WiX/MSI can install files to the GAC without using GACUTIL. If you use the WiX Visual Studio extension "Votive" you can create a .SLN / .WIXPROJ / .WXS that can be built using MSBuild. You can then put this into a source control system such as Git/TFVC/Subversion and use a build system such as VSTS V.Next Build, XAML Build, Concourse, Jenkins to automation the pipeline to build the MSI.
Related
I have add a WIX installer project to solution in Visual Studio 2013. The project is built with every commit on TeamCity. There are several build agents connected to TeamCity cloud, but only some have WIX installed.
Usually I would add the build agent requirement, so only the computer with WIX installed is selected for automated build.
What requirement should I select? Is there some environment variable I could use after WIX is installed?
I know I can set the environment variable manually on every computer I install WIX, but this is not nice solution for me.
There's a system environment variable called 'WIX', which holds the path WiX Toolset is installed to. It is created during WiX Toolset installation.
However, there might be a better way that avoids setting up any build agent requirements. Take a look at this article that explains how to integrate WiX into daily builds. Basically, it suggests committing the required binaries along with the source code of your app.
Both approaches have pros and cons, it's your choice.
The agent need to be restarted after installing WIX. Then there will be
env.WIX
requirment in the Teamcity.
I've had some trouble getting WiX projects to build on build servers. One of the pain points has been that my WiX projects are referencing libraries in c:\program files... and the build process calls executables in the same path. This is a bummer because I have to install WiX toolkit in order to get my project to build.
What's the best way to eliminate this headache by having all build tools local to the project being built?
Is there a nuget package that does this? (At the time of writing it appears not, but I wanted to verify.) Package Restore capability would be nice because then I don't have to include the (many) WiX files in git.
If not, what do I need to download from WiX? What do I need to modify so that the compiler knows where to find the binaries to build WiX projects?
You can download just the WiX Binaries .zip from http://wixtoolset.org/releases/ then you can modify your wixproj file and update the <WixToolPath></WixToolPath> element to point to your WixBinaries
The WiX documentation has an article that explains how: Integrating Wix Projects into your Daily Builds
There is an unofficial nuget package at WiX.Toolset.
However, note that this seems to only be applicable to the setup project itself (i.e. it cannot be used to fetch wix binaries for e.g. a class library assembly).
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 want to create an .MSI package from a web deployment project in Visual Studio 2008.
Now we want to use continuous integration and we would need the .MSI package build in the nightly builds.
Till now we used standard Visual Studio Web Setup project, but this is not compatible with the MSBuild. So we decided to use WiX.
The problem is that I have not found any good tutorial/documentation about this.
Is there a way to do a WiX installer package from a web deployment project? If yes, how?
Also, I tried to use heat.exe to create the XML for the WiX project .wxs file, but it seems that heat.exe doesn't recognize the web deployment project format.
Thank you for your responses.
Regards,
V.
I wrote a blog post about this recently - http://www.chrissurfleet.co.uk/post/2011/07/01/Using-Packaged-Project-Output-in-WiX-and-Visual-Studio.aspx
In short, its fairly easy to use msbuild to package up your web app and then pass it to heat to generate your installer from.
Hope this helps.
You've probably long since found a solution for this, but to elaborate on Tom Cabanski's answer, you can invoke Visual Studio to build the msi on the command line using "devenv.com" via an external process from within your build. It's not a pretty as using msbuild, but it gets the job done. Below is an example of how to invoke Visual Studio:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" your.sln /build Release
Where your.sln is the solution file for the solution you wish to build, and Release is the configuration you wish to build, ensuring that the configuration you choose actually builds the vdproj project.
Following the successful execution, you can grab the msi from the appropriate configuration's bin, and do what you want with it.
I'd appreciate your response to this with your findings/approach, as I'm trying to decide whether to adopt WiX or InstallShield as the approach to building msi's for Web Applications within TFS Build, or to continue with the approach I just described. I haven't had to opportunity to try WiX out, and my very limited exposure to InstallShield suggests that this is far to involved for my need, which is to produce a simple deployment aid for some relatively straight-forward web applications to the company intranet via TFS Build.
We used WIX on the installers for our last couple of projects and ended up regretting it. I would stick with the VS built-in projects and just invoke the VS IDE from the command line in the CI build.
Background:
I always try to ensure the following tenet in my projects:
After a fresh checkout a developer should be able to do all project related tasks with solely the contents of the combined folders.
Obviously, this isn't always possible (e.g. Visual Studio for Windows development). However, I really dislike having to install any third-party libraries or tools that are specific a project like log4net, NHibernate, NUnit, etc. There are number of reasons for this including:
For a given development machine, you may work on several different projects, all which leverage different versions of the same third-party library or tool.
Minimizing the environment setup requirements makes setting up new developers or machines much easier
Facilitates easier maintenance of automated builds
Assumptions/Contraints
I am currently using WiX 3 beta, but if there is way for either 2.0 or 3.0 please respond
I am using Visual Studio 2005
The IDE syntax highlighting is not a requirement.
Question:
Is it possible to avoid local installation of the WiX toolset and use flat files instead? If so, please explain how.
See Also:
First, build your WiX installer:
Create a new WiX Installer Project in Visual Studio 2005.
Build your WiX XML accordingly.
Now, to integrate the WiX toolkit into your source tree:
Copy c:\Program Files\Windows Installer XML v3\bin to a sub-directory in your source tree. I used WiX\bin relative to my .wixproj file.
Copy c:\Program Files\MSBuild\WiX\v3.0\ to a subdirectory in your source tree. I used WiX\v3.0 relative to my .wixproj file.
Either add the following code or replace the line that follows:
<WixTargetsPath Condition=" '$(WixTargetsPath)' == ''>$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\WiX\v3.0\Wix.targets</WixTargetsPath>
With the following lines:
<WixToolPath>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\WiX\bin\</WixToolPath>
<WixTasksPath>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\WiX\v3.0\WixTasks.dll</WixTasksPath>
<WixTargetsPath>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\WiX\v3.0\Wix.targets</WixTargetsPath>
As you can see, the WixToolPath, WixTasksPath and WixTargetsPath directives reflect the location of the folders I've instructed you to copy.
Rename your .wixproj to .csproj. This ensures that Visual Studio does not get confused by the .wixproj file but because the .wixproj is a valid MSBuild project, Visual Studio will be able to work with it.
Using this method, the WiX directory as described is about 9MB large.
I know with WiX 2, you can just download the executable files and the dll's to whatever directory your project is in. Then you create a .bat file to run candle.exe and light.exe with the parameters you need to build your installer.
That way, all your projects can have their own version of WiX with a disk drive hit of only about 4 megs each.
I'm not positive, but I think you can do the same with WiX 3.