WiX Burn 3.6 beta - custom UI examples

Question

Are there any good references/examples for WiX Burn 3.6 custom UI?

I googled around, but they are broken pieces of the information.

Solution 1

The WiX installer itself is a good example and the source is freely available via CodePlex (WiX 3.6 Beta). Check out the WixUX project, which is the bootstrapper for the WiX 3.6 install. Another Stack Overflow question is Custom WIX Burn Bootstrapper user interface?, describing how to get started.

Or if you get the latest weekly WiX releases, the project has been renamed to WixBA. See src\Setup\WixBA.

Solution 2

Yes, they are scattered all over. I am using Visual Studio 2010 to maintain my Product.wxs with a separate WXS file for the UI. Basically I've downloaded WiX Edit to design the UI.

A good start is to download the WiX source which has WXS UI files you can load into WiX Edit to see how they work. You can download the source from here.

What I did was to copy one of the WixUI files to my project in Visual Studio 2010. When you download the source they can be found under wix36-sources\src\ext\UIExtension\wixlib. In here you will find:

• WixUI_FeatureTree.wxs
• WixUI_InstallDir.wxs
• WixUI_Advanced.wxs
• WixUI_InstallDir.wxs
• WixUI_Minimal.wxs
• WixUI_Mondo.wxs

You can tell from this the dialog flows. However there are the individual dialog files in here such as:

• CancelDlg.wxs
• BrowseDlg.wxs

You can load these into the Wix Edit to preview the dialog. You should get a better understanding.

Additionally, the main Wix Page can be found at Wix Toolset.

I have ordered the Wix book, WiX: A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML, from Amazon which I hope will help me understand this more. £30.99 in the UK. Hopefully, this book will be money well spent. There is one review with five stars so fingers crossed.

Comments

[Tim Long]

It never occurred to me to get the source code for Wix itself. Duh!