Candle.exe

Candle, the WiX compiler, can be run from the command line to build your WiX source files. Behind the scenes, Visual Studio is really just calling this tool for you. When you use it yourself you can give it any of a number of arguments, which we'll discuss in the next section.

To make things easy, you should consider adding the WiX bin directory (under Program Files/Windows Installer XML v3/bin) to your computer's PATH environment variable. This is where Candle and all the rest of the WiX tools are. Right-click on My Computer in your Start menu, select Properties, then the Advanced tab, and click Environment Variables. From there, you can find the PATH variable and append the path of the bin directory. Note that WiX adds an environment variable during its installation called %WIX% that points to its main folder, but not its bin folder.

Command-line arguments (compiling)

In this section, we'll look at the basic syntax for using Candle on the command line. This is helpful in Visual...