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The WiX toolset makes MSDN Magazine.

I just noticed that Sayed Hashimi's article about MSBuild and the WiX toolset in the March 2007 issue of MSDN Magazine.  I reviewed the document a couple months ago.  It skims over the WiX toolset pretty quickly but that's okay because the real focus is on MSBuild integration.  Most importantly, I fully support the opening statement:

During the course of development, it's important to have an automated build process. Equally important is having an automated means of creating releases. Unfortunately, in many organizations-especially smaller ones-this doesn't happen. Typically, you'll find that the release is simply cobbled together at the last minute. However, if you take the time to set up an automated build and release plan, you'll save countless hours that could be better spent on tasks other than building and releasing your project.

That's basically a paragraph summary of my old MSDN Article.  Anyway, both articles are good quick reads.  It's also nice to see the WiX toolset getting a bit more exposure.

posted @ Friday, February 16, 2007 1:52 AM

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 re: The WiX toolset makes MSDN Magazine.

Left by Daniel Lishingman at 3/15/2007 10:46 AM

Application Suite Deployment Best Practices / Patterns

Hi Rob - I posted the following to the MSDN "ClickOnce and Setup & Deployment Projects" forum but I really would like to have your feedback on this topic, so I apologize for spamming you here... If you have any helpful comments, please email me or reply in the MSDN forum. Thanks!

---snip---
Hi, I'm looking for some best practices literature or guidance for the best way to architect a deployment system for a suite of Windows based applications. There are numerous best-practices guides about authoring a single .MSI, but I can’t find much information on deploying a suite of applications. The general convention seems to be that if you want to launch multiple .MSIs, you should use some kind of bootstrapper application like the Visual Studio bootstrapper to install the prerequisites and then launch the MSIs in sequence. However, I’d like to understand the best way to divide the suite into MSI’s / MSM’s – for example, should we author one MSI for each application or use one MSM for each application? Microsoft suites like Office and SQL server all seem to be composed of multiple applications with client and server components; I’d like to understand how those deployments are architected and use the same patterns in our deployment. It seems like the WIX toolkit is becoming a popular tool within Microsoft to author MSIs; however, do you still need to use this in conjunction with a separate bootstrapper application?

I’ll try to include some information / requirements about our suite:
1. Composed of several applications
2. Some of the applications have dependencies on others within the suite
3. Some of the applications have client and server components, which can be installed independently.
4. Some of the application installs accept common user input such as user names and folder locations. We would like to ask for the input only once and re-use it when appropriate.
5. Each application has it’s own release schedule, so the entire suite is not released at the same time. This is probably the biggest difference from the Office and SQL Server suites. Maybe this makes it impossible to achieve the same architecture?

Any help would be appreciated!

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