wix

For more information

• Blog announcement

• Release notes

Open Source Maintenance Fee

To ensure the long-term sustainability of this project, use of the WiX Toolset requires an Open Source Maintenance Fee. While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE, all other aspects of the project--including opening or commenting on issues, participating in discussions and downloading releases--require adherence to the Maintenance Fee.

In short, if you use this project to generate revenue, the Open Source Maintenance Fee is required.

To pay the Maintenance Fee, become a Sponsor.

For more information

• Blog announcement

• Release notes

Open Source Maintenance Fee

To ensure the long-term sustainability of this project, use of the WiX Toolset requires an Open Source Maintenance Fee. While the source code is freely available under the terms of the LICENSE, all other aspects of the project--including opening or commenting on issues, participating in discussions and downloading releases--require adherence to the Maintenance Fee.

In short, if you use this project to generate revenue, the Open Source Maintenance Fee is required.

To pay the Maintenance Fee, become a Sponsor.

Blog announcement

Release notes

Blog announcement

Release notes

Section titled “WiX v4.0.5”

WiX v4.0.5, released on Friday, 22-Mar-2024, contains fixes for two security vulnerabilities. All versions of WiX are affected by this vulnerability. We recommending upgrading to this version as soon as possible. For details, see the FireGiant blog post , the first security advisory , and the second security advisory .

Platforms

Section titled “Platforms”

• Arm64 is supported in the core toolset, extensions, and Burn.

• WiX extensions include platform-specific custom actions for the platform of the package being built. For example, an Arm64 package contains only Arm64 custom actions and doesn’t rely on x86 emulation.

Build tools

Section titled “Build tools”

• WiX v4 doesn’t have to be installed on every dev machine and build image like WiX v3. Instead, WiX v4 follows the modern .NET model of using NuGet to deliver tools.

• WiX v4 MSBuild projects are SDK-style projects; MSBuild and NuGet work together to bring down the WiX v4 MSBuild SDK NuGet package.

• Both .NET Framework MSBuild and dotnet build are supported.

• To build packages from the command line, WiX v4 is available as a .NET tool, which is also a NuGet package.

• WiX extensions are delivered as NuGet packages, which are usable from both MSBuild projects via PackageReference and the WiX .NET tool.

• For command-line afficionados, most executables have been merged into a single wix.exe tool with commands. For example, in WiX v3, you might build by calling Candle.exe one or more times to compile your authoring and then calling Light.exe to link and bind the compiled authoring into an .msi package. In WiX v4 using wix.exe , that’s one command: wix build -o product.msi product.wxs .

• Building patches is much easier (one command!) and can use MSI packages as the source of target and updated files.

• The WiX extensibility model and pipeline integration has been dramatically enhanced.

• The WiX language has been further simplified. For example:

• The Package element combines what was two elements ( Product and Package ) in WiX v3 .

• The StandardDirectory element simplifies the use of standard Windows Installer directories.

• The Subdirectory attribute on, for example, the Component element , lets you create subdirectories without nested Directory elements .

• WiX supplies a default MediaTemplate element if you don’t specify one in your authoring.

• WiX warns when mixing authoring meant for MSI packages in bundles and vice versa.

Burn, bundles, and bootstrapper applications

Section titled “Burn, bundles, and bootstrapper applications”

• The Burn engine is platform-specific, so you can build an x64 bundle that contains only x64 code and doesn’t rely on WoW64.

• .NET 6 and later are supported platforms for writing managed-code bootstrapper applications. .NET Framework is also supported.

• ThmUtil, the native-code UI library used by the WixStdBA bootstrapper application, supports new controls and authored conditions and actions that let themes add functionality without having to write custom C++ code. For details, see Thmutil schema .

• ThmUtil (and therefore WixStdBA) supports high DPI display settings.

• The new WixInternalUIBootstrapperApplication BA supports showing only the internal or embedded UI of an MSI package.

• Burn support other bundles in the chain via BundlePackage to automatically handle detection and uninstall command lines. Likewise, the ArpEntry element provides the same functionality for arbitrary executable packages in the chain.

• Burn supports SemVer-style versions.

• WixStdBA supports bundle update feeds as specified in an Update element .

• Burn now upgrades bundles with the same version numbers.

• When a user requires elevation to restart (common on Windows Server machines), Burn handles restart through the elevated engine.

• Custom bootstrapper applications can change the REINSTALLMODE used when applying MSI packages.

• The Burn policy registry value EngineWorkingDirectory in HKLM\Software\Policies\Wix\Burn is a string specifying a working folder root directory for elevated bundles when the default of C:\Windows\Temp is blocked by security policy.

• Burn no longer appears in the Apps & Features (ARP) list if a bundle has a pre-req that causes a reboot and the user cancels after the reboot.

• The /unsafeuninstall command-line switch lets users attempt to “force” a bundle to uninstall, even if dependency checking would otherwise leave it installed.

Deprecations and deletions

Section titled “Deprecations and deletions”

• Features that were deprecated in WiX v3, including command-line switches deprecated in WiX v3.14, have been removed from WiX v4.

• WixGamingExtension and WixLuxExtension have been removed in WiX v4.

• WixDifxAppExtension is deprecated in Windows 10 and therefore has been deprecated in WiX v4 and will be removed in WiX v5.