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Review of the Windows Installer XML (WiX) Toolset
Tuesday, 15 July 2008
A couple of weeks ago, one of the products I maintain for a client needed a new installer. This application is the server part of a client-server suite, and runs as a Service on Microsoft Windows. The old installer was built using the simple installer-builder that is part of Microsoft Visual Studio, and could not easily be extended to handle the desired functionality. Enter the WiX toolset.
As its name suggests, the Windows Installer XML Toolset is a set of tools for building Windows Installer (MSI) packages, using XML to describe the installer. At first glance, this doesn't look much easier than populating the MSI tables directly using Microsoft's Orca tool, but it's actually really straightforward, especially with the help of the WiX tutorial.
It's all about the <XML>
The perceived complexity comes from several factors. First up,
every individual file, directory and registry entry that is to be
installed must be specified as a <Component> and
given a GUID which can be used to uniquely identify that item. The
details of what to install where, combined with the inherent verbosity
of XML makes the installer build file quite large. Thankfully, being
XML, whitespace such as indenting and blank lines can be used to
separate things into logical groups, and XML comments can be used if
necessary. The installer GUI is also built using XML, which can make
things very complicated. Thankfully WiX comes with a set of
pre-designed GUIs which can be referenced from your installer build
file — you can even provide your own images in order to brand
the installer with your company logo, for example.
Once you've got over the initial shock of the XML syntax, the
toolkit is actually really easy to use. The file and directory
structure to be used by the installed application is described using
nested XML elements to mimic the directory structure, with special
predefined directory identifiers for things like the Windows
directory, the Program Files directory or the user's My Documents
folder. You can also use nested <Feature> tags to
create a tree of features which the user can choose to install (or
not) if they opt for a custom install. Each "feature" is a group of
one or more components which are identified with nested tags in the
feature tags.
Custom Actions
What if you're not just installing a simple desktop application?
Windows Installer provides support for custom actions which can be run
as part of the installation, and WiX allows you to specify
these. The old installer for the server application used custom
actions to install the service, but these weren't actually necessary
— the Windows Installer can automatically configure services, it
was just that the Visual Studio Installer builder didn't support
that. With WiX it's just a matter of adding a
<ServiceInstall> tag to one of your components.
The custom actions we did require were easy to add with the
<CustomAction> tags — you can write custom
actions as DLLs or EXEs, or even as simple VBScript included directly
in the installer build file. These can then be added to the
<InstallExecuteSequence> at the appropriate point,
taking care to specify the right conditions (such as whether to run on
install or uninstall, and whether or not to run depending on which
features are being installed).
Conclusion
The WiX toolset is very powerful, and gives you full control over everything the Windows Installer can do. Though the XML syntax is a little cumbersome, it is actually quite simple to use. Once you get used to the syntax, it is easy to see what the installer is doing, and what you need to do to get the desired effect. Though designing installer GUIs is quite hard, the supplied options will be sufficient in many cases and it is easy to customize them to your needs.
It's a free tool, so you can't beat it on price, and the tutorial really reduces the learning curve. Next time you need to build an installer, I recommend you give WiX a try.
Posted by Anthony Williams
[/ reviews /] permanent link
Tags: windows, installer, msi, wix, review
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2 Comments
The thing about the complexity of WiX is that it can be greatly offset if you're starting a project from scratch. The WiX guys recommend you build the installer at the same time as the application, and so as the application gradually gets more complicated, your installer also gradually gets more complicated.
Obviously, porting an existing installer to WiX is going to be an investment in time, but for brand new projects, I think the complexity is not such a problem... as long as you follow the recommendations.
Hi Dean,
You are right that it is much easier if you start the installer when you start the project. However, I found it wasn't too bad trying to convert an existing installer either. One feature I forgot to mention, which is quite useful when rebuilding an existing installer is the "dark" tool, which creates a WiX build file from an existing MSI. If you use this, you can see exactly which files the existing installer put where, how they were grouped into features, and so forth. I wouldn't recommend trying to edit such a decompiled MSI though --- for one thing, the included merge modules aren't separated out, so the build file includes all their logic too.