What does WIX need?

After a long time, I have got some time to get to my blog. After a long day of presentations, I guess it is only fair enough that I relax by concentrating sometime on my long forgotten blog. We in our organization primarily use InstallShield for most of our setup development needs. I and one of my colleagues were discussing the topic of distributed development. InstallShield is good in a lot of things but distributed development is not one of them.

As a common sense approach, distributed development is done using merge modules. Although these may be discrete chunk of non reusable installation units, merge modules are the only way to enable Distributed development with InstallShield. I then truly realized the power of WIX which inherently supports distributed development. I then mentally started preparing a list of features that WIX ought to have to replace tools like InstallShield.

1) GUI - I guess WIXStudio need to be pushed a little harder. I personally do not believe that a development tool such as WIX really needs a GUI. But if the world were to run only on my beliefs, it would be a far better place than it is right now . WIX language is pretty straight forward and the tool nudges the developers on to the right track. Where the tool fails to point to the right direction, wix-users list does the job.

2) Bells and Whistles - Tallow is a cool tool but is unfortunately very buggy. As Rob suggested it is a fertile field for development and is constantly improving. I have seen some pretty encouraging messages in the Users list. I still have not become a part of the dev-list as yet, as I really cannot contribute at this point in time. I would however like to do so as soon as I have access to my computer at home.

3) Dialogs - It would be great to have a dialog editor. If not a full blown IDE for WIX, the least setup developers expect would be to have a dialog editor. Rob would argue that setup need not have a user interface, but in reality, dialogs are required for a enterprise setup of a decent quality. I have posted a message on WIX-Users-list for a list of free/open source MSI editors with visual Dialog editors. We could then dark the setup and create a WXS fragment.

4) Documentation – Last but not the least, WIX really needs a lot more documentation. I have been really busy off-late and have not been able to contribute as much to WIX as before. I hope the WIX Wiki would grow to fill this need.

IMHO, WIX is still the best tool to create installations for large projects.