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Monday, October 21, 2013

IsWiX 22.13293.1 Released

I always liked the  Code View / Design View patterns in Visual Studio so I choose to emulate this in IsWiX.  Another aspect of this is to have one source file maintained by a code emitter and another source file maintained manually by the developer using a text editor.  Think  Foo.cs and Foo.Designer.cs  in Winforms or  XAML / CS in WPF.

Usually you can mark up IsWiX authored XML without problems ( add various element such as ServiceInstall, ServiceControl, ShortCut and so on )  but sometimes you need to add an element that might cause IsWiX issues ( Component typically ) or that you want to really add a lot of custom action elements and related sequencing and you really want that code in another file for readability.

To solve this problem I like to create a second .wxs file and use the Fragment element.  Then with the use of ComponentGroup, ComponentGroupRef, DirectoryRef, Directory and Component elements you can tie the two together.   This is sometimes a little hard to explain to a new WiX developer so I decided to make this the default experience in IsWiX merge module projects going forward.   With that said, go check it out here.

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