votive, wix, vsip, and all things microsoft : MSBuild

How to embed resources using a different namespace in a C# project

jrock — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 11:11:00 GMT

Have you ever wanted to embed a resource in your managed assembly but didn't like the default name that Visual Studio decided to give it? For example, if you have a C# project with the RootNamespace="MyCompany.MyNamespace" and have a bitmap called "MyBitmap.bmp" in your C# project, then when the project compiles, you end up with "MyCompany.MyNamespace.MyBitmap.bmp" in your assembly resources. Well, what if you wanted it named just "MyBitmap.bmp"?

The trick is to manually tweak your .csproj file and add the <LogicalName> element as a child of the <EmbeddedResource> element:

<EmbeddedResource Include="MyBitmap.bmp">
  <LogicalName>MyBitmap.bmp</LogicalName>
</EmbeddedResource>

Now your resource will be embedded with the name you give it instead of having it autogenerated.

How to use MSBuild for your WiX projects without installing Votive or Visual Studio

jrock — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 01:33:00 GMT

I got an interesting question today from a person reading my blog, so I thought I'd answer the question here in case other people have a similar interest.

The question was how to enable MSBuild support for a WiX project without having Votive or Visual Studio 2005 installed. The scenario is that this person uses Vista for his build environment and does frequent upgrades to the OS. He doesn't want to have to install Visual Studio 2005 every time he repaves his machine to just get his WiX projects to compile. Fortunately, this scenario is supported.

Basically, you have to do some very minor manual configuration of the WiX MSBuild tasks if you want to use MSBuild and WiX without installing Votive or Visual Studio. The key is to have the WixTasks.dll and wix.targets files copied to Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\WiX\v3.0 directory. You can now create an MSBuild file to compile/link your WiX projects. At the end of your file you should add the following line:

The other alternative is to use the new Votive that will be released very shortly (within the next couple of weeks). The new Votive has support for MSBuild by having the .wixproj file be a native MSBuild file. You could use Votive to create the .wixproj file for you with all of the various options you want for the compiler/linker and then just use that file on the build machine without installing VS 2005 or Votive.

Hope this helps. I will probably also put a sample .wixproj file up here in a future blog so you can see what it would look like to manually create a .wixproj (or whatever extension you want to use) MSBuild file.

Moving the WiX toolset to NAnt builds

jrock — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 09:58:00 GMT

As many of you may know, we've had two different builds for the WiX toolset: one for the external world (i.e. SourceForge), and the other for the developers working on WiX inside of Microsoft. These two builds were different enough to mess things up from time to time, and at the very least was annoying trying to port from one to the other. Therefore, we've decided to start using a new build system. At first we thought we'd use the new and improved MSBuild system that comes with Whidbey. However, we found that it doesn't support VC++ builds out of the box. Strike 1. We also found that it wasn't overly intuitive on how to get started with it and maintain it. Strike 2. And to top it off, it doesn't support building to the 1.1 .NET Framework. Strike 3.

I must say that I think the Visual Studio team has made some great improvements by introducing MSBuild in Whidbey and it's great in a lot of circumstances, just not ours. I honestly can't believe that it doesn't support .NET 1.1 or build VC++ projects. Maybe next version.

Since Bob, John, and I all had previous experience with NAnt, we thought we'd try it out on WiX. So far so good. I only have a couple of the projects converted over, but the build times have greatly decreased (almost by a factor of 10), the build files are much, much more readable than our NMAKE sources/makefile.inc, and it's just a lot more fun to use NAnt. For one thing, you have the nice IntelliSense when editing .build files in Visual Studio. Also, it should be much easier for people to build the WiX toolset from the SourceForge drop. I'm hoping that we can roll out the NAnt version within a week or two.