MakeMsi and Wix

We have been using MakeMsi to build our installer since the beginning of VS.Php a few years ago. It has been working great for us and more importantly, the support Dennis offers is great through the yahoo groups site. I have no complains in that regard. As we work on international versions of VS.Php, we have been going through a bit of pain using MakeMsi, in particular with Japanese support.

I've been looking at Wix and it looks very promising. I'm going to try to get a Wix installer for the next release. I plan to remove a lot of complexity from the installer like selecting features and configuring file extensions. I figure most people don't care about changing the default settings for any of those things. The one thing I'll keep is the directory location.

Wix has help registration integrated with it which will remove those annoying command windows showing up during the installer.

Another thing I hope to improve is the build times which right now is pretty long (8-9 hours). A lot of it has to do with building all the installers. If you wonder why is so long, we build release and debug builds. There are 4 editions and 3 languages. Also we have full and lite builds. In total there are 48 installers to build.

If you have any comments about keeping some of the existing functionality from the installer let me know, otherwise next release will have a much streamlined installer.