Often very helpful - especially for dealing with common tasks. The default binary file storage format allows no real source control or branching unlike WiX which delivers this out of the box. I think there is a way to store the project in text format, but I never used it. Not sure how effective it would be. Without a shadow of a doubt, by far the buggiest of all installation products. In fairness most bugs relate to the special " Installscript MSI " project type that implements a custom dialog model for MSI setups rather than the native, table based GUI which is suppressed.
Please take this to heart, if you still use them - they are particularly hard to upgrade properly first time deployment might be OK, but upgrades are breaking. Other projects types seem to work well. After abandoning Installscript MSI which most people seemed to do , the tool worked quite well for me personally not bug free though. I needed to go for WiX's flexibility and customizability instead of Installshield's ease of use.
There was simply not enough flexibility and control available. Support for Microsoft App-V virtual packages and new virtualization technologies. Allows a few new things compared to a normal application. Application streaming - no local installation on machines - JIT. Use two incompatible software on the same computer. Updating through the server. Present the application quickly and easily to users.
More Microsoft marketing here. Wise Wise is officially retired , but it has been resurrected before. I am still leaving in the summary of the good Wise features: Fast and easy and quite feature rich.
Very good ease of use overall, excellent feature set. Lacking in some very advanced features such as IIS, advanced release management, etc Less code focused than Installshield.
Uniquely capable and flexible graphical scripting editor. Well designed setup configuration GUI. Also excellent for small development teams looking for a quick and relatively easy way to get their application deployed. Sometimes lagging slightly with latest technologies compared to Installshield , but comparatively "bug free". Intuitive GUI, common things are very easy. Very nice handling of installation sequence configuration and custom actions in a script style editor.
More GUI scripting, less coding. Rock solid , very few significant bugs. Help resources and community support not on par with InstallShield, but still good. My tool of choice for debugging and prototyping fast, stable, easy to use, great diff features. And with regards to the diff features allowing binary comparison of two MSI files. The ease-of-use and clarity of the diff viewer was no less than fantastic.
For corporate packaging such diff-features can be a very critical part of the job as you have hundreds or even thousands of different software packages to manage in many different versions.
On a subjective note : my favorite packaging tool. Very reliable. It is a real shame that the tool is no longer available. We can always hope for a "reincarnation" I have seen GUI snippets that look like Wise in some other tools.
WiX quick-start tips The big plus is the text source files. There is no need to store the source as a binary where it is almost impossible to track changes and do proper version control. Proper text sources make all the difference for development teams in terms of branching , versioning and merging. It is a quantum leap in my opinion particularly for in-house development in large corporations - where process is complex, turnaround is quick and there are many developers.
The need for and use of text source files was central to the creation of the WiX toolkit. Here is a quick and incomplete "WiX history" with more details.
Recommended read to grasp the foundation and rationale for WiX. Some deployment tools that store the installer as binaries could end up in situations where the binary source would exhibit mysterious problems that could never be tracked down properly.
This happened particularly after tool updates which also updated the format in the source for whatever reason. The upgrades would often affect dozens of tables and hundreds of records making it an impossible task to track down the real problem effectively. Symptoms included things such as the sudden onset of slow builds, sudden slow installation speed, unexplainable compilation errors, even total file corruption etc With WiX you have full transparency and "leanness" for your source.
It is just cleaner and more reliable when done right and automatic updates of the source is possible, but won't cause cascading changes through dozens of MSI tables. Combined with source control changes are easily tracked and hopefully understood - no mysterious, undocumented stuff added.
With all that said it must be noted that upgrading from WiX 3 to WiX 4 source files appears to not be trivial. Let's hope this is a one-time situation. I am not sure why this has happened to be honest, and I don't have up to date information about it. Straight from the horse's mouth as the Internet makes possible - it is a wonderful world at times ;-.
Rumor has it they are doing " turtles all the way down ". Rock solid, very few significant bugs. For those who have struggled with long-standing, intermittent, unexplainable bugs in other tools, this is a godsend. And even better: problems actually seem to get fixed in WiX, sometimes with community help - as is appropriate for an open source toolkit.
Most of the time it seems the core team takes care of it though. Very feature rich , but somewhat hard to use at times. Takes time to get used to, and even when you are used to it things can be "fiddly" to get right particularly if you don't use the included helper tools properly.
It helps to use the dark. This allows you to study the WiX source without knowing too much about it beforehand. WiX effectively " extends Windows Installer " with new and much needed functionality. This is a massive benefit for everyone who previously had to "roll their own" solutions - often for things that seemed trivial but was still very error prone. The power of these extensions can not be overstated.
You can get rid of a lot of self-written, complex custom actions in favor of tested solutions. With proper rollback support! Things seem to be improving, perhaps try this short summary. An interesting project might be IsWiX. Advanced Installer offers Installer Analytics as a way to track important KPIs, for your software, with a single click. Many more features can be found on our features page.
Features for IT professionals Virtualization is becoming increasingly popular in companies because they give fast and easy deployment. Repackager is one of the most important features in Advanced Installer because it can help you turn legacy installation packages, and convert them into industry standard MSI packages.
Once your installation has been captured, it is turned into an Advanced Installer project, from here you can do your changes, or even create a virtualized package. Using this feature you can easily modify existent tables from the package, but also add and remove tables. The GUI helps track changes made directly to the table using colors to mark the edited tables and rows.
Afterward, you can build and modify it as you require. The first option is to import an MSI package ; please note that small adjustments are required to be made after the import, depending on the complexity of the original package.
The second option is to repackage an EXE setup package. As explained above, you can repackage in a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine or directly on a physical machine.
We recommend the virtual machine option as it will give you much more accurate results. The repackaging process captures only the changes made by the installation. Luckily, for beginners, it also includes a bunch of plug-ins and pre-defined scripts to get you started.
The program supports a tons of other features including installer self-verification using checksum, list and tree for component selection, silent mode for automated installations, full code editor for writing scripts, etc. Advanced Installer also has a free version, but it also has several other versions that go up in price depending on how complex your installer needs to be. If you want a feature breakdown between the five different versions they have, then check out the link. The free version actually has a lot of features and we were able to use that in our company for a long time because our installers were fairly simple.
One unique feature to Advanced Installer is Installer Analytics. All of this on a sleek and modern web interface that you can test yourself.
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