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Comment by JBReefer | Hacker News Reader

I like the laptop with a bunch of lovely Microsoft technologies, and then WiX.

Please, please die WiX. Imperative XML + non-deterministic execution order + the worst error messages of the entire stack. I love C# and the CLR, but damn WiX sucks.

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I suspect the real problem is the underlying horrible mess that is MSI. MSI is perhaps the most unintuitive technology I've ever used. Much of WiX is simply a bunch of leaky abstractions from MSI.

I haven't done a lot of 'Windows exclusive' development for a while, but something like 6-8 years ago, I was making an installer for a small company that up to that moment, they had to send someone over to spend a whole day installing the software on client's machines.

I was strongly suggested to use WiX. I spent 2 months trying to get something to work, but I wasn't able to get nothing truly useful to run. I remember explicitly that something as simple as writing to the registry was proving problematic. To make it worse, documentation was poor, and there wasn't much of a community around it cause it was brand spanking new.

Two months in, without telling anyone, I decided to ditch it and use NSIS. That day I had something that actually worked! Within 2 weeks I had something that was running end to end, installing the software on the machine. The next month was polishing, and testing/fixing for different versions of Windows.

I have no idea how things may have changed now, but if I tasked with making a Windows installer today, I wouldn't even think twice about using anything other than NSIS.

Can NSIS by now roll-back partially failed installations? That's to me the biggest gripe I have as a user of such installers – whenever something weird goes wrong you end up with a half-installed application of which you don't know how to get rid of the pieces.

Good question. It's honestly been too many years for me to remember. But, with a bit of a biased view on it because of having such a good experience with it so long ago, I imagine it either does, or provides the mechanism for the developer to implement it.

You delete the directory to get rid of the pieces.

Assuming it hasn't done a bunch of other stuff yet. While Microsoft recommends that the install directory is the application bundle and programs should confine themselves to it, that's hardly what many applications are doing.

It depends on who and how you want to deploy it, but chocalatey may be a good option. You distribute apps as nuget packages (which are just zip files).

For the server side there's octopus, which I've been very impressed by, also done via nuget packages.

Rob Mensching the creator of WIX was on dot net rocks recently. Might give you a bit of a perspective from the other side :) http://www.dotnetrocks.com/?show=1367

I can't believe WiX hasn't already died. I tried using it 7 or 8 years ago. What a terrible idea to use XML like that. But, that was back when XML was ... the ... bees ... knees! I mean everyone was gaga over using XML for everything.

Based on the current developer zeitgeist, I expect them to transition to JSON.

Wow, I'm surprised they still have that around!

I stopped doing .NET dev almost 7 years ago. At the time, WiX was terrible, but then so were a lot of things. .NET didn't even have a deployment story back in those days.

It still doesn't have a good one for desktop apps.

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