Jeff Hoover wrote:
I've noticed that there are a couple of possible routes build my vdproj from NAnt, namely VDProjConverter and msi2xml/xml2msi. Additionally, some people suggest shelling out to devenv to build the vdproj, but the requirement of installing VS on the build server doesn't sit well with me and it seems like an ugly work-around. Finally, there's MAKEMSI which looks like it would work, but I'd have to throw away my vdproj and start fresh to create my setup.
Would anyone who is building a vdproj in any of these ways (or in some
way I haven't found yet) care to comment on their success?
I've started working with both WiX and the NAntContrib MSI task.
I can't find any indication that VDProjConverter is still under development, as the link from the blog (http://www.biasecurities.com/blogs/jim/archive/2004/04/10/432.aspx) appears broken. It's also just over a year old, and I think requires either WiX or the NAntContrib MSI task.
As near as I can see, msi2xml is just another XML representation of MSI files, without the smarts and limitations of WiX and NAntContrib's MSI. While I haven't seriously studied the question, my gut feel is that WiX will eventually overcome its limitations, which are largely due to limitations of the Microsoft Windows Installer. It buys you the ability to easily convert your existing .msi file, but I'm not sure you really want to be maintaining your .msi as raw table rows and columns.
MAKEMSI looks interesting, but it's difficult to tell. I know that I don't want to learn yet another embedded html scripting language; ASP and PHP are quite enough. The documentation is disjointed and concept free, but lots of programmer-written docs suffer from that. I don't think you're right that you'd have to throw away your vdproj file, as it has a dump command (but that you missed it is illustrative of the problems with the docs).
The question you should be asking has nothing to do with NAnt, but rather is which is best for building MSI files, and how fancy do you need your installation to be. In other words, how difficult will it be to use their definition language to create the .msi you want.
My money is on WiX, because that's the only project team that I'm sure has a deep understanding of the constraints on the installer. In particular, there's a serious issue with any msi tool that allows you to select all files in a given directory on the source system to put into the msi; it can be done, but it takes much more infrastructure than the tools at this level typically provide.
Gary
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