Installing WiX 3.5 alongside WiX 3.0

Question

Is it possible to install both WiX 3.0 and 3.5? If I install 3.5 after installing 3.0, it removes the 3.0 files - and if I attempt to install 3.0 after 3.5, it tells me there is

Answer 1

The way wix is currently designed you can't have 3.0 and 3.5 both installed on the same machine. They do provide a zip version of wix that enables you to let your build automation self deploy wix onto the build server to get around this limitation. You do lose certain things like visual studio integration though.

Answer 2

I ended up:

• Installing WiX 3.5.1916 with the .MSI package (later versions failed in strange ways which I didn't put much effort into figuring out)

• Copying the following files to the build server:

  • %programfiles%\Windows Installer XML v3**
  • HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Installer XML\3.0 (SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ for x64 systems)
  • %programfiles%\MSBuild\Microsoft\WiX\v3.0**

It builds successfully now, I haven't done much testing with the resulting files though. So it seems it is possible to have 3.0 and 3.5 concurrently, it's just a minor pain to make it work.