Saturday, June 26, 2004 12:47 AM
Well I wanted to complete my blog entries for whats left over traces I have from my volatile memory (My head not my PC) but unfortunately I got sort of seduced by the adventures of Pooja with WiX and MSI's and gave up to the temptation to blog out of the way. The other part of me as a developer is a Installer / build lead who happens to crave to find this ahem niche set of people who dedicate their lives to write that piece of software which takes the first bite from the end-user and interact and share our feelings together. Ya its that installer you loved to hate as it never completed the installation or scrwed up your box.
Ok Coming to the point.
These were the queries which I wanted to follow up with Pooja's blog entry about MSI's & Orca and WiX.
>> The problem with WiX is its scanty documentation
I thought smart geeks dont need documentation, they hack their way all around
Yes I agree but if you need more information then you should look into the Platform SDK documentation on the MSI Database. Wix Elements and Attributes are more or less aligned with the MSI database table/row names :)
>> In the situation that I was in, Orca solved the problem smoothly. That is exactly what I needed
Yup thats true you dont have any dependencies to use orca. Orca.exe [Or One Really Cool App - thats how the original developer of orca.exe calls/ed it] is standalone but for WiX you need the dotnet framework to run which I sometimes feel a Minus. Especially in my case when I need to finish this Install.msi or setup.msi and test it up in various environments which are actually VPCs with various combos including those where the fx is not available and that times I just have good ol' Orca.exe to help me to tweak.
>> Do drop me a link to Dark [not a download link]. Thanks!
as in... ?
YourFavouriteToolsFolder\WiX\binaries-2.0.1720.0\dark.exe [is this what you are looking for?]