Recently I have got an opportunity to work on creating installers for some of our products. In past I never got involved in post development activities but during my current job I spent some time in development related to deployment.
I have discovered there is a whole world out there to explore. Even the tip of the ice berg is quite vast.
Initially I created installers based on MSI technology using Visual Studio. However, I experienced that the approach was not friendly when it come to incorporate some product changes in installer. This is because we need to recompile the entire project and subsequently do some changes to resultant installer via orca. Addition/updation is a very common requirement in the web-based products we sell. For example, sometimes there is a small change like css update of an image/icon changes. This approach, which I was using required someone to rebuild the Visual Studio project which implies that visual studio is present on the machine. In addition, another dependency exists in the form of a person who knows visual studio and has some experience of creating installers.
Eventually a need of such an approach was felt which could free us from such dependencies.
The research resulted in the discovery of Microsoft WIX (Windows Installer Xml). WIX which is based on MSI technology allows us to descriptively create installers using XML files. There are tools through which people only specify the folders that need to be part of the installer and facilities are available to almost do whatever that is necessary while creating installer. Plug-ins are also available to integrate WIX with visual studio.
However, it must be kept in mind that the learning curve is quite steep. To facilitate people who are interested in learning WIX, I am listing some of the resources that I found useful. I will be adding some more resources to the list after filtering the collection I have
Creating WIX Installer for ASP.NET Web Application
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/install/asp_wix.aspx
From MSI to WiX
http://blogs.technet.com/b/alexshev/archive/2008/02/10/from-msi-to-wix.aspx
WIX Tutorial
http://wix.tramontana.co.hu/tutorial
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