wixsharp

As harsh as it may sound, the Wix Toolset is such a steaming pile of garbage and waste of everyone's time who have had the misfortune to work with it that their best monetization strategy would be to charge for proper documentation and working examples, instead of playing games like "you can't view issues without paying us". Easily on of the worst pieces of software I've come across. Alternative: https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp/

I can recommend Wixsharp (https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp), you no longer have to learn the insane wix xml syntax to create an installer.

It seems like a good rule of thumb though. Here's a diagram of the 11 different tools you need to study to create an installer with WiX, which takes literally thousands of lines of XML: https://documentation.help/WiX-Toolset/tools.html By contrast, WiX# provides a complete code sample that specifies a complete installer in less than 20 lines, with no diagram necessary: https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

> Even if they stick with Java and try to learn jpackage they quickly realize they need Windows, and a Mac, and maybe Linux just to make packages that their friends can run at all And when they test it on Windows they'll realize that the launcher that jpackage creates does something weird on startup (possibly involving relaunching itself? [1]) that makes Windows display a busy cursor for a while after the program has launched, so they'll have to forget about jpackage and redo it all with something like Packr [2] and Wix# [3]... [1] https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/fe45835f7cebfccd4544ae19... [2] https://github.com/libgdx/packr [3] https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

The functionality in the msilib module is somewhat low-level anyway (it basically just opens the database for you and leaves the arcane incantations required for doing anything as an exercise for the reader) so it probably wouldn't be hugely difficult to replace it with ctypes calling msi.dll directly. If I were to replace my msilib-based installer, I would migrate to Wix# [1], a fantastic high-level wrapper for WiX that lets you express your installer in a few lines of C# (and then generates the thousands of lines of XML that WiX needs, but you don't need to touch it). I wouldn't have used msilib if I had known about Wix# at the time. [1] https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

The preferred solution seems to be WiX, which was created by some of the people behind MSI and generates the MSI database from an XML description. Unfortunately it requires you to write (or copy from somewhere) literally thousands of lines of incomprehensible XML. You have to learn all the details of both MSI and the various novel sublanguages embedded in the WiX XML. But fortunately you can generate all the XML from just a few lines of nice and clean C# using WiX#, which adds a user-friendly API on top of WiX and lets you forget about XML and databases entirely: https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp

C# UWP: you need to create a .appinstaller file C# WPF/Winforms: https://github.com/oleg-shilo/wixsharp/wiki C# WPF/Winforms: Or, you can create a .vdproj which will createa an .msi (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...) I've used all 3: depending on your needs, you may choose one. If you need more info, let me kwow more details about your use case.