Deployment Tools Foundation

Writing custom actions with .NET code means making use of the Deployment Tools Foundation (DTF). Here, we'll touch on some of the more common parts of the DTF library. However, you should also take a look at the DTF documentation that comes with WiX if you'd like to explore some of its other features. For example, although we won't cover it here, DTF has support for LINQ and CAB file compression. The examples in this section draw from DTF's Microsoft.Deployment.WindowsInstaller namespace.

The session object

When the InstallUISequence and InstallExecuteSequence tables run through their lists of actions, they're doing so in their own memory space—called a session. You've seen how this requires you to mark WiX properties as public (uppercase) to get them from one session to the other. In DTF, the Session object is your pipeline into each sequence's running state. Every .NET custom action method receives session in its parameter list. If you recall, the generic signature...