I just had a look at WiX, a toolset to generate Windows installer packages from an XML description.

After the hype about Microsoft making an internal project available as Open Source Software is calming down again, I wondered what one could do with it. Building installers is certainly part of many build processes, so an Ant task sounds reasonable. I downloaded the source and there is some part written in C++ but for most of it it looks as if I should be able to run the binary on Mono. I'll give this a try.

Loren Halvorsen's Blog shows how to use WiX from NAnt. The example could be literally translated to Ant, but a <wix> task could do better - at least it could pipeline compiler and linker into a single step and it could sit on top of my .NET task library experiment so that it transparently runs on Mono or Microsoft's CLR.

Unfortunately all the documentation I could find is inside a chm file - does anybody know of a viewer for this that runs under Linux or MacOS X?

path: /en/dotNet/wix | #