Good resources for learning how to create MSI installers from WiX [closed]

I've given up trying to apply lipstick to the pigs of installers that come out of Visual Studio and have decided to look at WiX.

What resources would you recommend to learn and reference?

(Note - this is not a which-installer-technology-do-you-use question - it's specific to WiX.)


  • The WiX tutorial is the #1 resource
  • The people on the mailing list are very helpful
  • There's a The Code Project article, Creating an installer using Wix v3.0, Votive, and Visual Studio 2005/2008 - Part 2, the GUI that might help
  • Ther's a bunch of blogs, I keep bumping into Rob Mensching's (old).
  • Rob Mensching's new blog.
  • I haven't read WiX - Windows Installer XML (broken link), but I found it in my bookmarks
  • This code project tutorial outlines the bare minimum and builds up from there

One of the best ways I found to learn WiX was to take an existing MSI that did something I wanted to do, and used the Dark decompiler to generate a WiX script from it, and then I read that.


Apart from the links provided by people above, also have a look at the approach I use to explain this to people :

Wix Commands for creating msi from wix :


From first glance From MSI to WiX seems fairly comprehensive.