In his blog entry about OSCON, Rob Mensching talks about his WiX presentation:
I finished up my presentation by noting that the entire demo had been done with the WiX toolset running on Mono. The look of amusement on everyone's face in the room was priceless. I'll provide more instructions how to build the WiX toolset to run on Mono in a future blog entry.
I'm really looking forward to this since this will help me to work on the WiX task for Ant that I've started to experiment with.
On a related note, I managed to make Ant's <ilasm> and <wsdl> tasks work on Mono (both using my Linux desktop and my iBook running MacOS X) - at least all unit tests we have pass.
path: /en/dotNet/wix | #
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 | #