WiX

WiX stands for The Windows Installer Xml (WiX) toolset (pronounced wicks toolset), it is an XML toolset that builds Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages from an XML document. It supports a command line environment that developers may integrate into their build processes to build MSI and MSM setup packages.

1 Internal structure
- 1.1 Candle
- 1.2 Light
- 1.3 Lit
- 1.4 Dark
2 History
3 Miscellaneous
4 External Links
5 References

Internal structure

Wix is composed of four parts: a Candle, Light, Lit and Dark.

Candle

Candle, the Compiler The compiler, called candle, is used to compile the XML documents to object files that contain symbols and references to symbols.

Light

Light, the Linker takes one or more object files and links the references in the object files to the appropriate symbols in other object files. Light is also responsible for collecting all of the binaries, packaging them appropriately, and generating the final MSI or MSM file.

Lit

Lit, the Lib Tool The lib tool, called lit, is an optional tool that can be used to combine multiple object files into libraries that can be parsed by light.

Dark

Dark, the Decompiler takes existing MSI and MSM files and generates XML documents that represents the package.

History

On 2004-04–05 WiX was the first Microsoft project to be relased under an externally created Open Source licence, the Common Public License. Also it was the first Microsoft Shared source project to be hosted externally (on sourceforge.net).

Rob Mensching, the original author and lead developer of WiX, works on WiX in his spare time. At the time of release he said, "I did not feel that many people inside Microsoft understood what the Open Source community was really about and I wanted to improve that understanding by providing an example."

Miscellaneous

The project name WiX has quite an unfortunate name in German, when pronounced it sounds like wichs, and wichsen is manual stimulation of the male genitals, usually masturbation. If someone introduced you as the "Leiter des WiX projekts", that would mean you are the leader of the masturbation project. (wixen, wichsen, v.: to wank).

External Links

References

A Slashdot article by Steve Mallett [1], Retrieved 2004-04–24 from http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/23/2229232
A MSDN Blog entery by Rob Mensching [2], Retrieved 2004-04–24 from http://blogs.msdn.com/robmen/archive/2004/04/05/107709.aspx
A Slashdot post clarifying the meaning of Wichsen, Retrieved 2004-04–24 from http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=105216&cid=8957822
An "Introduction to WiX" presentation by Hüsnü Kaplan [3], http://installworld.com/content/view/12/53/

Categories: XML standards

WiX

Table of contents