[wix-devs] Nugetizing Wix

[Heath Stewart]

Are there any short-term plans for building out WiX nugets? Both for the toolset (sans Votive or other SDK content) and extensions? I know that for extensions, the idea was to wait until it's worth it - for example, if they lived in their repo and could version independently. Makes sense.

But a lot of projects internally are moving to isolated cloud builds, and I've created a nugetized version of the toolset that you simply reference in a project and it just works ("nuget restore" on the solution is required first so that the .targets are available early on). I'd be happy to do this work in the repo. Not only would it be useful to others, but I could also stop maintaining our own pseudo-build internally to do so.

I brought up the nugetization of extensions, though, since maybe it's worth it to do the work even if it doesn't make sense. For example, I've discovered after doing it (so people could reference extensions in this environment more easily than tracking down the DLLs in a nugetized build toolset) that you can't simply add Items to the project. Apparently there's either an MPF bug or a bug in how we implement something that prevents the projects from loading. This is why, for example, when I sent a PR for the work to nugetized dutil, I hooked an early target with our own target that adds the ItemGroup. It's unfortunate it doesn't show up in References in Solution Explorer, but at least the project can load after being unloaded/closed.

Heath Stewart
Visual Studio, Microsoft
http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths