WiX: Building a Patch using the new Patch Building System - Part 2
I dont have much time today to write but I wanted to take a chance to answer a few questions that I've been asked a lot recently.
What is Pyro?
Pyro is the new tool in the WiX toolset that will pull together your patch authoring and your product transforms in order to build you an msp.
What is the new system and what is the old?
It is important to distinguish the new patch building system from the previous one provided by WiX. There has been some confusion and I want to try and clear it up.
The Previous Way:
The PatchCreation element has been supported in WiX for a while to help people build patches. It essentially helps users build a pcp file which is then used as input to the PatchWiz tools. The PatchCreation element is not used in the new patch building system.
The New Way:
The Patch Element is a newly added element that lets you describe the contents of your patch. It contains information about where the files your patch contains should be stored as well as summary information that describes your patch to your end user. It also supplies a mechanism to filter out specific changes to be included in your patch. When this element is passed to candle to be compiled and the resulting wixobj's are passed to light to link, the result is a WixMsp. This is an xml representation of the patch database (msp).
What Next?
The next thing I'd like to do is to provide a simple example of how to build a patch using Pyro.exe. I plan on getting this started in the next few days. Keep bugging me if I dont to remind me to do it and feel free to ask me more questions as this new functionality isn't all that well documented yet.
