How to include all of a project's output in the installer project?

Question

I need to include all the output from some of the programs projects in the installer... my question is similar to the one in this post: How to add a whole directory or project output to WiX package

However, I am afraid I don't really understand the answer given in this link. From all the reading I have done, I think I need to use Paraffin to do this. But is there a "start from the very beginning, how-to" resource for using paraffin?

I have read this page: http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrobbins/archive/2008/12/22/paraffin-3-0-now-with-full-wix-3-0-support.aspx and one of the posts mentions calling paraffin from a bat file. Is this how one would "use paraffin" in their installer? If it makes a difference, I have been using Visual Studio to work on this project, and am also not sure how to use command line from within Visual Studio. Does anyone have any resources for a very new beginner? Thanks.

Answer 1

I ended up including each .dll and .exe manually, since they don't change very often. It was fairly easy to format them in this style:

`<File Id="WhateverId" Name="NameToDisplayAfterInstall"      Source="$(var.ProjectName.TargetDir)Filename.ext" />`

I used Excel to format a list of files quickly and easily. I put all of these File tags in the <DirectoryRef Id="INSTALLLOCATION"> tag.

I did figure out how to scrape all the dlls and exes from the project output by using Heat (not paraffin) and harvesting a directory, not a project. Harvesting a project yields only the main exe and dlls. The problem with harvesting a directory, at least in my case, is that I ended up with a lot of excess files, (like .pdb and .xml) that I didn't want.