Tor Bådshaug
5/26/2008 9:02:00 PM
BlankI am considering setup technology for deploying my web application. Immediately I would turn to Web Setup Project and/or WiX, but I am starting to doubt if they are appropriate for my scenario.
Focusing on Web Setup Project, I have the following issues:
1. The files to be deployed by the installer is not available design time. "Project output" is a zip-file prepared by msbuild. Thus, the "add project output" is not helpful to me (I cannot link this zip-file into the installer, at least I don't know how)
2. A lot of custom actions will be needed for a lot of steps
-- backup some files, take server out of load balancer, iisresets, certificate setups etc, apply some specific environment parameters to web.config,
With these issues, I am left wondering what standard installer technology offers to me. Uninstall features and registry manipulation is not that interesting either, our deployment is basically xcopy of the extracted zip-file plus all those "custom actions".
I start thinking I am better off writing a specialized, standard Win32 app for our installer, would you agree?
Do you think WiX can offer anything?
BR
Tor