WIX features

After my recent cribbing about my wish-list for WIX, it is only fair that I talk about the advantages of WIX over other tools like InstallShield. I am primarily comparing it with InstallShield, as it is the only tool that I am aware of to an extent and is also the current market leader (in my opinion) in the installation tools market place.

1) XML Format: WIX source files are in a programmer friendly format. You are allowed to comment the code at any place, that makes the installation project source files as readable as the application's source files. Tools like InstallShield X allow you to save your file in the XML format but editing the XML and adding comments to it is not really easy. Furthermore, the changes in the source code across versions can be easily tracked by diffing from the source control, which would be very inconvenient with binary files.

2) Distributed Development: Each setup developer or even the application developer can edit a small fragment of the project to produce multiple WXS files which can be compiled independently and linked in the final process to produce MSI/MSM files. To my knowledge, this feature is currently available only with WIX. Of course, you could use other tools to create Merge Modules, but they would only add to the confusion with the modularization of the columns than to aid the process of distributed development. You can use WIX to maintain the readability of code. You could include comments within the code to actually point to the WXS file from which the element is referenced.

3) Clean Installation: You do not have to go through a whole big deal of the installation process just to get the package authoring system available on the build and the design environments. The WIX package decompressed is only 3.56 MB including the documentation and comes completely with custom actions to work with IIS, SQL Server, hypercharged LockPermissions functionality and much more. There are no DLLs to be registered, no registry entries to be created. Just unzip it into a machine with .NET Framework 1.1 installed and WIX would run without any problems. You would need Platform SDK on the machine to work with merge modules. Or at least the mergemod.dll registered on the build machine.

4) Custom Action Library: WIX comes with a custom action library to install/configure IIS websites and virtual directories. It is also present in InstallShield. WIX has support for SQL Server 2000 which is also present in InstallShield X. So I guess that levels the playing field. What WIX currently does not have is the support for installing COM+ Applications. But people following the Wix-Users list would know that these are already been worked upon and there have been a couple of users who have implemented the code and are currently contributing it back to the community.