Enable WiX project in Visual Studio 2013

I have a VS 2012 solution with WiX Installer projects. However, when I open the solution in VS 2013 (Release) the WiX project is incompatible.

Does anyone know where / whether a VS 2013 version (wixtoolset ?) is available being worked on yet? Or is there a way to make the current project compatible in VS 2013?

Solution 1:

Update 2013-12-02: WiX Toolset 3.8 is released with official support for Visual Studio 2013 editions. It is available for download from wixtoolset.org.

You can manually enable Visual Studio 2013 compatibility with older versions of WiX:

1. Copy
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\WiX to
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\WiX

2. Modify
   C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Microsoft\WiX\extension.vsixmanifest by adding the following:

   <VisualStudio Version="12.0">
       <Edition>Ultimate</Edition>
       <Edition>Premium</Edition> 
       <Edition>Pro</Edition>
       <Edition>Express_All</Edition>
   </VisualStudio>
   

3. Then open VS2013 Native Tools Command Prompt (from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\Tools\Shortcuts) and execute:

   devenv /setup

When you open Visual Studio 2013, WiX 3.7 projects will be compatible.

Solution 2:

Just update to WiX v3.8, it does support VS2013: http://wixtoolset.org/releases/v3.8/stable

Solution 3:

If you install VS2013 after WiX you will have to uninstall WiX then reinstall it. Just repairing the WiX installation is not sufficient.

Solution 4:

After running the toolkit installer for wix:

For Wix 3.8 and 3.9, with Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, I was required to delete all the cache files in:

"%appdata%..\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\ComponentModelCache" (for VS 2012) and "%appdata%..\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\ComponentModelCache" (for VS 2013) respectively.

After deleting these files, execute from command prompt for each version of VS:

devenv /setup

e.g. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv /setup"

and "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv /setup"

Only after I deleted these files and restarted the machine did executing "devenv /setup" have the desired effect.

If these cache files are not deleted first, then you may experience a problem where your packages fail to load properly. You will know if your packages fail to load because VS will fail miserably upon startup.

Solution 5:

With WiX 3.7, even if you cannot open wixproj in Visual Studio 2013, it does compile using MSBuild for a VS2013 solution. (change wixproj ToolsVersion="12.0")