I’ve got a new article titled “WiX Tricks: Automate Releases With MSBuild And Windows Installer XML”. This article covers in detail how to create an automated build & release process using MSBuild & the Windows Installer Xml Toolset. Not only does it describe how to achieve an automated process, but I actually provide you will an extensible set of MSBuild files that can be used to easily do it for you! If you are already using WiX to create your installation packages then integrating my targets into your process should be very straight forward. You can download all the sources from article site, but you may be better off getting it from my Sedodream MSBuild project site. I’ll be maintaining the files on that site, so it is better to get the latest directly from there. If you do use my targets, please let me know what your experiences are. I’ll be continuing to expand on those and your feedback is important.  One of the items that are pretty important for me is to integrate Install Shield installations into this process. I’ve created an internal process to do this for me, but it is not re-usable as the WiX ones are. Soon I hope to be able to complete this.

Also in this article I do cover some more advanced MSBuild topics such as MSBuild batching in pretty good detail. As far as I know this is the only published article that covers batching in any kind of detail.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi