Wix and CruiseControl.Net

An Introduction to Wix

I guess the first thing I should do in this post is introduce Wix. For those who haven’t met Wix before it stands for Windows Installer XML. Basically it’s another open source tool for building MSI packages. The main difference between this and some of the other tools (e.g. Nullsoft) is it is entirely XML-based. Since MSI packages are based on internal tables, not setup scripts I think the two go well together.

Now I tried to take a quick look at the existing installer in CruiseControl.Net, but I couldn’t find where it is. Since I took the easy approach and gave up and changed to something that I’m used – Wix.

A Newer Installer

For those of you who are wondering why I’m doing this in the first place, I wanted to make it easy for people to try my new extensions to CruiseControl.Net (WCF and security). The idea being if I can make it easy for people to install, then hopefully people will start using it and give me some feedback on how I can improve it.

So, what is in my new installer. First, there are the standard components:

• The console and service versions of CruiseControl.Net (the actual heart of the system)
• CCTray
• Web dashboard

Next I’ve added my WCF extensions:

• WCF extension for the server
• WCF custom transport for CCTray
• WCF router

Finally I added in CCCmd (my command-line interface to CCTray) to allow people to use non-UI tools (e.g. scripting languages, etc.)

In case you’re wondering where the security is, it’s been built into the standard components. People can turn off security, but it cannot be removed. In future releases of CruiseControl.Net it will be in the main product line, but I don’t consider it ready yet to be added into the trunk.

I’ve also spruced up the interface a little – I’ve given a new logo and splash banners in the installer. I’ve also included the standard license. People have a choice of typical (just the standard components), custom or full installs – so they can choose exactly what they want.

I’ve got the service installation working, but I’m having problems with the IIS registration (not sure if it’s my machine or something else).

Where is it?

For the moment I’ve added the Wix code to the security trunk (we can discuss what to do with it in the long term later). I have also loaded it to my google repository (here) so it will be available for general access.

Please let me know any feedback on it, or on any of the WCF/security work. I should mention that this is a work in progress – I hope to smarten it up later on and add some nice functionality to it (more on that to come).