[wix-users] More Advanced WiX Bootstrapper UI

[Alasdair King]

Matt Hauk:
"I have a question about how people are using / expected to use the WiX
Bootstrapper, in particular with reference to the UI component. It seems to
me to be incomplete as it stands for anything beyond bundling
prerequisites."

There isn't a bootstrapper in WiX:
http://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2012/6/25/b-is-for-bundle-and-thats-good-enough-for-me/

The referenced setupexe/setupbld was removed a couple of versions
back, and that was ONLY a bootstrapper - install pre-reqs, run MSI

I write bootstrappers in VB6 because I don't know enough C++ and VB6
doesn't have any dependencies so I know it will definitely run. They
then launch MSIs built with WiX. This is particularly important
because WiX has complete translations for the de-facto Windows
Installer dialogs in many languages, saving me much work. And the UI
looks like users expect from an installer, so that's great.

I would characterise the situation as "Use WiX for building your MSIs,
because it's incredibly good at that: use something else for
bootstrapping, because Burn is not a bootstrapper".

However, you might find the "WiX Extended Bootstrapper Application"
does what you need, since it adds lots of the UI features that you
want to Burn: I tried it out, and it looked plausible, but I was still
spending more time wrestling with Burn than it would take to do a
simple bootstrapper.

https://wixextba.codeplex.com

I'd be very interested to hear other thoughts: I'm sure Burn is the
same high quality as the rest of the WiX system, but it's never made
sense to me, so I'd love to see anything on using it.

-- 
Alasdair King