Designer for WiX Toolset Developer Guide
Designer for WiX Toolset
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Why WiX Designer?
Microsoft introduced Visual Studio Installer many years ago. In Visual Studio 2012, they discontinued it in favor of WiX - Windows Installer XML, a free software toolset that builds Windows Installer packages from XML code.
WiX is a flexible tool that provides an XML interface to features provided by Windows Installer (previously known as Microsoft Installer). Still the Windows Installer concepts create difficulties for developers. Even with the XML interface of WiX. This becomes evident in the typical case of "creating a simple installer". Although the concrete meaning of the term "simple" varies, most developers agree that "seeing the picture" is often more productive than "reading the text file".
"Seeing the picture" is what Visual Studio Installer provided for developers. With slightly more than a couple of dialogs, Visual Studio Installer allowed the developers create the "simple" installer they craved for. Now with Visual Studio Installer withdrawn, WiX Designer fills the gap. This tool will simplify and speed up the creation of your WiX setup projects in Visual Studio by providing the UI familiar to any developer who created setup projects using the Visual Studio Installer.
For more information, please see:
- Creating a standard MSI installation package
- Building a web setup package
- Creating a multi-language installation package
System requirements
- Visual Studio 2010 (Professional, Premium, Ultimate) with WiX 3.6+ installed
- Visual Studio 2012 (Professional, Premium, Ultimate) with WiX 3.6+ installed
- Visual Studio 2013 (Community, Professional, Premium, Ultimate) with WiX 3.6+ installed
- Visual Studio 2015 (Community, Professional, Enterprise) with WiX 3.10+ installed
- Visual Studio 2017 (Community, Professional, Enterprise) with WiX 3.11+ installed
- Visual Studio Express Edition is not supported.