Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
90 lines (69 loc) · 6.15 KB

QUICKREF.md

File metadata and controls

90 lines (69 loc) · 6.15 KB
Raw

WiX Toolset Quick Reference ↩

WiX toolset This document gathers WiX hints and tips.

WixUI_InstallDir-dialogs

The dialog strings must be localized. WiX comes with 40 sets of loc strings; you specify them using the -cultures switch to %WIX%\light.exe.

WiX custom variables

The WiX Toolset engine supports 3 types of custom variables :

  • Environment variables : The syntax is $(env.<var_name>) where <var_name> is case-insensitive. For example, we write $(env.APPDATA) to retrieve the environment variable %APPDATA%.
  • System variables : The syntax is $(sys.<var_name>).
    CURRENTDIR - The current directory where the build process is running.
    SOURCEFILEPATH - the full path to the file being processed.
    SOURCEFILEDIR - the directory containing the file being processed.
    BUILDARCH - the platform this package is compiled for (Intel, x64, Intel64, ARM).
  • User-defined variables : The user has two ways to defined them, either at the top of a WiX source file as <?define MyVariable="Hello World" ?> or from the command line using option -d, e.g. candle -dMyVariable="Hello World" ....

WiX built-in variables

The WiX Toolset engine provides many built-in variables to be used in WiX source files. In particular, some of them are needed to target the runtime architecture (e.g. x86, x64, ia64) of the generated Windows installer.

For instance, the variables below are defined as follows for a 64-bit Windows operating system 1 (CSIDL="constant special item ID list") :

WiX variable CSIDL Path
CommonFilesFolder CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES_COMMONX86 C:\Program Files\Common Files
CommonFiles64Folder CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES_COMMON C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files
ProgramFilesFolder CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILESX86 C:\Program Files (x86)
ProgramFiles64Folder CSIDL_PROGRAM_FILES C:\Program Files
SystemFolder CSIDL_SYSTEMX86 C:\Windows\System32
System64Folder CSIDL_SYSTEM C:\Windows\SysWOW64

The WiX developer has to take care of them when specifying the candle option -arch <name> :

> %WIX%\candle.exe --help
Windows Installer XML Toolset Compiler version 3.11.2.4516
Copyright (c) .NET Foundation and contributors. All rights reserved.

 usage:  candle.exe [-?] [-nologo] [-out outputFile] sourceFile [sourceFile ...] [@responseFile]

   -arch      set architecture defaults for package, components, etc.
              values: x86, x64, or ia64 (default: x86)
[...]

Footnotes ▴

[1] Windows System Information ↩

On the Windows prompt we call the command wmic.exe to display information about the installed Windows operating system : 
> wmic os get BuildNumber, Caption, OSArchitecture, Version
BuildNumber  Caption                   OSArchitecture  Version
19042        Microsoft Windows 10 Pro  64-bit          10.0.19042

☛ WMIC Deprecation
wmic.exe is deprecated since the Windows May 2021 Update (21H1).

Alternatively we get the same system information with the PowerShell cmdlet Get-WmiObject : 
> powershell -c "Get-WmiObject -ClassName Win32_OperatingSystem | Select BuildNumber,Caption,Version,OSArchitecture"
 
BuildNumber Caption                  Version    OSArchitecture
----------- -------                  -------    --------------
19042       Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 10.0.19042 64-bit

mics/December 2023 ▲