Automating MSI Build Process

Question

Does anyone have a good way to build MSI (vdproj) projects using MsBuild or Nant?

I know one answer was to install Visual Studio on the build server and just use devenv.exe to build the project, but, I prefer not to install Visual Studio on our build servers.

Answer 1

Short of the method you mentioned above (devenv), there is no way to do this with the current version of MSBuild.

The method the Visual Studio team uses to run their MSI builds is with Windows Installer XML. You can learn more about using WiX to deploy setup packages here.

Please note WiX doesn't support vdproj files so it means you'll be recreating your installer projects.

Edit: Looks like I was beat to the chase when grabbing my references :)

Answer 2

We use Wix to automate MSI builds for IronPython and IronRuby.

EDIT: to clarify, this probably means starting over from scratch when building your installer. While Wix has a mechanism to create a configuration directly from a preexisting MSI file, I've never gotten a satisfactory result from using this tool