Building an installer without Visual Studio

Now that you've been shown Candle and Light, it may help to see a complete example of compiling and linking a WiX project to get an MSI. First off, create a new directory for your project and call it PracticeWix. Next, add a text file to it called InstallMe.txt. This will give us something to install. Then, create a file with the .wxs extension and call it PracticeWix.wxs.

Open PracticeWix.wxs with a text editor like Notepad and the following markup. It will install the text file to a directory called PracticeWix. We'll add one of the built-in WiX dialogs too.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2006/wi">
   <Product 
      Id="*" 
      Name="PracticeWix" 
      Language="1033" 
      Version="1.0.0.0" 
      Manufacturer="Myself" 
      UpgradeCode="B9B82C37-34EC-4F50-9D0E-0DF8F06F1F64">
      
      <Package Compressed="yes" />
      <Media Id="1" Cabinet="media1.cab" EmbedCab="yes" /&gt...