Chapter 14. Extending WiX

WiX facilitates plenty of use cases out of the box. However, there are tasks that just don't come built into Windows Installer by default. Thankfully, the WiX team and others have extended WiX to cover a range of extra functionality such as installing websites, creating users, and editing XML files. In this chapter, we will cover how you can join in the fun by building your own extensions. This allows you to craft custom WiX elements that bind to custom actions to perform complex tasks, but stay consistent with the WiX declarative, XML style.

We will explore the following topics:

• Hooking into the WiX extension model using classes from the Microsoft.Tools.WindowsInstallerXml namespace

• Defining an XML schema for new WiX elements

• Parsing those elements when they're used in a WiX project and storing the result in the MSI database

• Associating the elements with custom actions to be run at install time