Today's (actually a while ago but I forgot) discovery:
https://wixsharp.codeplex.com - Wix done via C#. I'll get to that in a minute, after this boring story.
I just spent a weekend looking into Win installer GUIs. Yeah, I bet you're jealous.
Advanced Installer is the nicest one I've found so far that does MSI with MSM merge modules plus patch-updates but that version is US$1,499. & $499/yr maintenance OUCH. That sucks because the $399 & $139/yr would be fine if it made patches, it does auto updates but doesn't build them. What a rort. There's a free version that doesn't do most of what you actually need (it has a
long feature list but meh). What sucked more is that it built a broken MSI as soon as I added any RealDwg MSM to it. I never got it to build an MSI that worked with a RealDwg MSM. Yes, I'm thinking the same thing but it I can't fix that either. Worse, it also completely obfuscates anything Wix-related - you never see any *.wxs files and you can't debug the process. You could
decompile the MSI with dark.exe but meh. That's a shame because Advanced Installer is actually usable by mortals and I seriously considered buying it just put me out of my misery. But no, the misery continues...
Installshield was more confusing than Wix, a bigger installation than Windows and more expensive than the looming US election (good luck with that). Just so you don't think anyone had less fun than you last weekend, I tried Advanced Installer, Add in Express, Install Aware, MSI Factory, Install Shield (in case I win a lottery) and I forget whatever else. I didn't bother with anything that costs more than a car that's faster (or newer) than mine. These and most of the other (expensive) tools don't expose Wix XML and it makes them really hard to debug which is especially troublesome for Wix. The downside of hiding all the Wix is that it hides all the Wix so you never know what is _really_ going on.
I revisited Wix angle brackets,
"Wax" (Visual Studio Add-on which I already use) and also Wix# at
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/31407/Wix-WixSharp-managed-interface-for-WiX which is basically a C# transpiler into Wix but it does actually build and uses Wix XML so you can see what you broke, or at least learn how it actually works.
You can Automate some of the XML building with the Visual Studio add-ons from the Wix Tools set and "Wax" ... and learn more Wix ... it still seems to be the most painless (in the long term) way to do MSI installers, for differing counter-intuitive values of "painless"
IsWix would be good if it still worked properly, which small parts of it it don't (the
file drop target zone). There's a post about it at
http://blog.iswix.com/2011/03/installation-collaboration-workflows.htmlNone of the Wix builders I like (or can afford) do patching in any sensible manner. So, here we are. Patching for MSIs that don't upset the Add/Remove programs can really only be done with
MSP installers.
So today I be mostly mucking about with Wix#
For updates I'm pretty-much sold on
https://wyday.com/wybuild/help/automatic-updates/. I'm using their
LimeLM and it's solid, working really well. Recommended. It's also large (2.5MB if you include the floating license DLL) so perhaps a bit impractical for small AutoCAD plugins. I'm revisiting Infralution for that one. Still undecided though.