Adding a User Interface

Although you'll eventually want to add your own dialogs to gather information from the user that's important for your own application, you may want to use one of WiX's built-in dialog sequences in the meantime. All of them are stored in an assembly called WixUIExtension.dll. You can add a reference to this file with Visual Studio's Add a Reference screen. The file exists in WiX's Program Files folder. You may have to navigate to C:\Program Files\Windows Installer XML v3\bin.

Once you've added the new reference, add the following line to your WiX source file. It doesn't matter exactly where, as long as it's a child to the Product element:

<UIRef Id="WixUI_Minimal" />

This will insert the Minimal dialog set into your installation sequence. It shows a single dialog screen containing a license agreement and Install button. Feel free to try any of the other dialog sets. Just replace WixUI_Minimal, with one of the other names in the UIRef element. WixUI_Advanced and WixUI_InstallDir require some further setup to really work properly. You can try out the following attributes:

• WixUI_Advanced

• WixUI_FeatureTree

• WixUI_InstallDir

• WixUI_Mondo

We will explore these standard dialogs in more detail later and also explain how to create your own.