[ Go back to normal view ]

BW2 :: the bitwise supplement :: http://www.bitwisemag.com/2

Visual Studio 2012 - getting to grips with WiX
Installing made easy(ish)

29 October 2012

by Dermot Hogan

Writing an installer for Visual Studio is not simple task - especially if you want to support more than one version of VS...

One of the consequences of the release of Visual Studio 2012 has been the demise of the Visual Studio Setup and Deployment project (vdproj). To be honest vdproj was never that great and I can’t say that I mourn its passing. But something has to replace it and the free InstallShield Express wasn’t capable of building the installations that I require.

I’ve been working on the next versions of Amethyst and Sapphire (Ruby in Steel) - the two Visual Studio IDEs made by my company, SapphireSteel Software. One of the jobs was to make sure that both worked with the new version of Visual Studio 2012. Mostly this has been straightforward with none of the labour required when moving from Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2010, when Microsoft introduced a new core text editor (that was hard work!). The main problem has been the requirement to find a replacement for vdproj that works with both Visual studio 2010 and Visual Studo 2012.

I’ve just written a fairly in-depth account of how we solved this problem using the WiX installer. Read more on the SapphireSteel Software site...