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Oleg Shilo edited this page May 28, 2018 · 26 revisions

Wix# (WixSharp) managed interface for WiX

The project is currently being prepared for migration to GitHub from CodePlex: Wix#. Thus some links may still point to CodeProject Wiki articles.

The first publicly available version of Wix# was published in 2009 on CodeProject. The original CodeProject article along with this interview for InfoQ offer the best explanations of the reasons behind Wix#. They describe very well the problems and common deployment challenges that Wix# is trying to solve. They also provides a good overview of the existing deployment authoring solutions and approaches.

Wix# is a framework for building a complete MSI or WiX source code by using script files written with the C# syntax. The simple code snippet below is a typical MSI setup authored with Wix#:

using System;
using WixSharp;
 
class Script
{
    static public void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var project = new Project("MyProduct",
                          new Dir(@"%ProgramFiles%\My Company\My Product",
                              new Dir("Tools",
                                  new Files(@"Tools\*.*"
                              new File(@"Files\Docs\Manual.txt"),
                              new File(@"Files\Bin\MyApp.exe")));
 
        project.GUID = new Guid("6f330b47-2577-43ad-9095-1861ba25889b");
 
        Compiler.BuildMsi(project);
    }
}

The Wix# documentation comes in the following forms:

  • XML code documentation
    XML documentation contains the code samples (embedded in the class summaries) as well as the complete description of all class members. While the code documentation is available in the form of API Reference CHM help file it is not intended to guide the developers through the development but rather assist with the codding.

  • Code samples
    Extensive collection of the code samples (\Samples) from release package. This is the most useful source of information and the best way of learning Wix#. All samples are self-sufficient and cover an extremely wide range of the deployment scenarios. The code samples make a significant part of the total Wix# codebase volume. you can also browse read-only samples directly in GitHub samples folder

  • CodePlex Wiki

  • Code Contribution Guideline
    A small set of development points to assist developers with contributing to the Wix# project.

Additional/External Documentation:

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