Do most things in Wix have to be done by hand?

Question

I've been using Click Once for longer while now and it was easy to deploy applications to my customers. But lately I decided it's time to move on as there are things that I simply can't fix in ClickOnce deployment (like ngen Devexpress libraries).

So I would like to move to WiX but I was wondering if I really have to

<DirectoryRef Id="INSTALLLOCATION">
  <Component Id="Executable.exe" Guid="{C4DCEDD2-B4FF-4DFB-B7D6-2FA8B16D7740}">
    <File Id="Executable.exe" Source="C:\MySourceFiles\Executable.exe" KeyPath="yes" Checksum="yes"/>
  </Component>
  <Component Id="documentation.html" Guid="PUT-GUID-HERE">
    <File Id="documentation.html" Source="C:\MySourceFiles\documentation.html" KeyPath="yes"/>
  </Component>

  ... each dll goes here
  ... each xml goes here
</DirectoryRef>

Do I have to really go thru 70+ files and put one by one and generate GUID for it? Can't it autogenerate it from Directory or something and then eventually I could just fill it in? Or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

No you don't you can use the harvest tool heat to generate wxs files. See http://wix.sourceforge.net/manual-wix3/heat.htm for more info. There are more features in the latest build of 3.6 that are not documented here so check the help for your version.