Hacker News Reader

“It's been a gigantic annoyance for the people at Microsoft”

Maybe they should provide better tools. Last I tried to deal with MSI I quickly went back to NSIS and got it done in a fraction of the time.

View on HN

The tools in Visual Studio definitely feel clunky and dated.

I use the WiX toolset[1] to build MSI files. I can't comment on the learning curve, though. I've been using WiX for far too long to remember what learning it was like. I find MSI files and Windows Installer itself immensely valuable, so I can't imagine using anything that doesn't generate MSI files.

[1] https://wixtoolset.org/

When I used WiX, I found it very... clunky? Everything in XML, lots of attributes to fill out, etc. And, at least when I was trying it out, the generated MSIs didn't appear to have any sort of GUI (or so I read. I don't believe I ever got to the point of generating an MSI).

I will say though, I remember the documentation being helpful and fairly straightforward, if a tad large (but that's what you get with a tool that's supposed to solve a complex problem).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com