[wix-users] Adding Output of a Reference Project

[Bryan Dam]

I have multiple EXEs that need to be installed as well as called via deferred custom action.  Their projects are in the same solution as the WiX project and each contain a whole long list of dependencies (NuGet packages).  What I'm having trouble doing is automatically capturing the output of the EXE projects.  I can manually build the EXEs and copy everything into an existing supporting file directory we harvest with HeatDirectory task.  That works but ideally I'd like to be able to build the whole solution in one go.

I've tried using project harvesting but while that grabs the actual EXEs themselves it doesn't grab their dependencies (a known issue).

So I'm trying to use HeatDirectory: Directory="$(ProjectDir)\..\MyReferencedProject\bin\$(Configuration)".  This works and generates the output file but the source all point to SourceDir as the root and the build complains that it can't find the files.  With the supporting files we use a pre-processor variable but in this case I want to refer directly to a relative path.

Is there a way to get the HeatDirectory task to generate relative paths to the source files?  Or maybe a better way to accomplish this whole thing (consume all the files in a referenced project's output folder)?

   Thanks,
      Bryan