Bob posted a blog entry how to use TortoiseHg to access the WiX source code on CodePlex. I thought the blog post was great but suffered from one fundamental flaw. It required you to do a whole bunch of mouse clicking. Here's how to get into the WiX toolset source code using the command-line.
There was a small change made to the WiX toolset recently that added dialogs to the WixUI library that are shown when patching. That part of the change was straight forward, the tricky part was that the dialog needed to support all the existing languages or the patch UI could come up in a different language (English) than the initial install. Fortunately, the Office Communications Server team (who was adding the patch dialog) was willing to localize the dialogs in all languages they support, 30+ of them. That's good news but there is some bad news.
Since it's launch in 2004, the WiX toolset has been completely hosted on SourceForge.net. SourceForge is fine but feels a bit clunky and a little behind the times. About a year ago I started looking at alternatives since open source hosting platforms are now a dime a dozen. In the end, I didn't find a single platform that offered everything I wanted. However, CodePlex provides Mercurial and a much better file release system than SourceForge so I decided to use those for WiX. For now bugs and the mailing list do not move (I'm still looking).
This question comes up so often, I should have written this blog entry years ago. The root issue is that the Windows Installer does not save Property values for you. That means if the user enters values in the install UI or passes them on the command-line, those values will be not be present during repair, upgrade nor uninstall. That last one, uninstall, catches people all the time. So let's solve the problem simply then solve it completely.
© 2010 RobMensching.com LLC. Powered by RobMensching.Blog using a slightly modified DePo Clean Theme.