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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

If application developers actually use MSI(X) instead of Nullsoft/InstallShield/Inno/random homegrown EXE installer that spews stuff all over the FS. I've been contributing a lot to the winget repo, and well over half of the applications (including Microsoft(!) software, including Office, Visual Studio, Teams, and VSCode) do not come in a MSI.

It's been a gigantic annoyance for the people at Microsoft as they are trying to figure out how to do upgrades/uninstalls without the data you'd usually get from a deb or whatever.

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As a Windows sysadmin I pine for developers to use MSI. Having applications managed by the Windows Installer makes automated installation, removal, and repair so easy. MSI has its warts, to be sure, but "clean" MSIs (that don't rely on lots of custom actions, embed binaries that the just execute, etc) are a joy to work with.

How well a software developer / "manufacturer" deals with "setup" in the Windows ecosystem has almost always been a proxy for overall software quality in my experience. When "setup" is left as an afterthought I can usually expect other corners have been cut. When I see a custom binary running an installation I start thinking "brown M&M's".

As someone who dabbles in Windows desktop development, I still don't know the best way to even make an MSI. Some of the tools from Microsoft are usable but they all seem to be obsolete.

The WiX toolset[1] is what I use. I've never used the Visual Studio extensions for WiX. I do everything with a plain ol' text editor.

[1] https://wixtoolset.org/

If you start from scratch, I'd suggest to use MSIX [0] instead. It makes auto update trivial to implement with PackageManager.UpdatePackage(url_to_your_msix)[1] or plain execute via "ms-appinstaller:?source=url_to_your_msix". It'll do diffs properly and you also get package reflection for free via WinRT apis (such as where app is installed, appdata location, app version, etc).

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/msix/overview

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.management....

Assuming I'm not building a UWP app, how do I build an MSIX. The only thing I found was the MSIX packaging tool and the description is this:

"You can run your desktop application installers through this tool and obtain an MSIX package that you can install on your machine or upload to the Microsoft Store. "

Gross.

I need to look into MSIX. MSI has been handling my needs for awhile now but I hear MSIX is really nice. Thanks for the nudge to look in that direction.

The preferred solution seems to be WiX, which was created by some of the people behind MSI and generates the MSI database from an XML description.

Unfortunately it requires you to write (or copy from somewhere) literally thousands of lines of incomprehensible XML. You have to learn all the details of both MSI and the various novel sublanguages embedded in the WiX XML.

But fortunately you can generate all the XML from just a few lines of nice and clean C# using WiX#, which adds a user-friendly API on top of WiX and lets you forget about XML and databases entirely: https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

The perspectives in the comments on this article re: WiX XML source and Windows Installer being difficult are interesting to me. Like I said elsewhere, I overcame that learning curve so long ago that I can't put myself in a position where it seems daunting now.

To be fair, though, an MSI to install a 10 files in "C:\Program Files\AppName", register a couple .NET assemblies, create a couple of shortcuts, and throw a few values into the registry would amount to <100 lines of XML.

Here's a years-old WiX 2.0 syntax source file to install 4 files in "C:\Program Files\appname" and run an EXE embedded in the MSI to install a service: https://github.com/EvanAnderson/ts_block/blob/master/MSI/ts_...

I've only seen "thousands of lines" of WiX source when dealing programs that install a ton of files, or put scads of entries in the registry.

Most of the MSIs with WiX are based on a simple skeleton generated from a template, and using "includes" generated by the "candle" tool.

Understanding the Windows Installer and the WiX source feels analogous to what I see in "modern" web development-- a bunch of tools that developers use, seemingly without understanding what they do, to create a massive pile of edifice into which original code is finally placed.

“It's been a gigantic annoyance for the people at Microsoft”

Maybe they should provide better tools. Last I tried to deal with MSI I quickly went back to NSIS and got it done in a fraction of the time.

The tools in Visual Studio definitely feel clunky and dated.

I use the WiX toolset[1] to build MSI files. I can't comment on the learning curve, though. I've been using WiX for far too long to remember what learning it was like. I find MSI files and Windows Installer itself immensely valuable, so I can't imagine using anything that doesn't generate MSI files.

[1] https://wixtoolset.org/

When I used WiX, I found it very... clunky? Everything in XML, lots of attributes to fill out, etc. And, at least when I was trying it out, the generated MSIs didn't appear to have any sort of GUI (or so I read. I don't believe I ever got to the point of generating an MSI).

I will say though, I remember the documentation being helpful and fairly straightforward, if a tad large (but that's what you get with a tool that's supposed to solve a complex problem).

msix is truly a good format, but it has some limitations. it's hard to have external dependencies and you NEED a certificate.

Don't some of those help build msi packages? I thought at least InstallShield did.

InstallShield can, but they're not particularly nice MSIs. I remember an old Symantec Antivirus MSI (2005-2006 timeframe) that used InstallShield's "ISScript" which ended up not being capable of being uninstalled in an automated manner. It was a pain. Search-engining those keywords today shows me that ISScript-related problems persist.

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