WiX

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The Windows Installer XML toolset (WiX), pronounced "wicks", is a free, open-source toolset that builds Windows Installer (MSI) packages from an XML document. It supports a command-line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages. This software is released by Microsoft under an open-source license called Common Public License.

Contents

[edit] Internal structure

Wix is composed of several components, whose names derive from a play on words on the "wick(s)" of a candle.[1]

[edit] Candle

Candle, the compiler, is used to compile the XML documents to object files that contain symbols and references to symbols.

[edit] Light

Light, the linker takes one or more object files and links the references in the object files to the appropriate symbols in other object files. Light is also responsible for collecting all of the binaries, packaging them appropriately, and generating the final MSI or MSM file.

[edit] Lit

Lit, the library tool is an optional tool that can be used to combine multiple object files into libraries that can be parsed by Light.

[edit] Dark

Dark, the decompiler takes existing MSI and MSM files and generates XML documents that represents the package.

[edit] Tallow/Heat

Tallow is a tool for generating WiX filelist code by traversing directory trees. It produces a WiX "fragment" which can be incorporated with other WiX source files at compile time. It will be rendered in WiX 3.0 by a more general "harvesting" tool known as Heat. There is also an unofficial version of Tallow known as Mallow[2], which adds synchronisation capabilities and improved component id generation.

[edit] History

On April 5, 2004, WiX was the first Microsoft project to be released under an externally created Open Source licence, the Common Public License. It was also the first Microsoft Shared Source project to be hosted externally (on SourceForge).

Rob Mensching, the original author and lead developer of WiX, works on WiX in his spare time. At the time of release he said, "I did not feel that many people inside Microsoft understood what the Open Source community was really about and I wanted to improve that understanding by providing an example."

As of 2006, several other Microsoft employees from various product divisions of the company work on WiX with Mensching, meeting after business hours once a week to co-ordinate development efforts and write code. WiX has proven to be so popular with Microsoft development teams that most of Microsoft's software products are either already packaged using WiX (as is the case with SQL Server 2005), or will be for their next version (eg. Office 2007).

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2005/12/22/506760.aspx
  2. ^ http://www.infozoom.de/download/Mallow.zip.

[edit] External links

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