Potential problems when we are migrating from Installshield to WIX 4

339 Views Asked by At

we have a legacy installer built using Installshield. Considering the cost and licensing issues we are moving towards Wix. If any has made this switch what were the problems you faced like Upgrade scenarios ?

1

There are 1 best solutions below

0
On

I did this migration two years ago for the same reason and it was not as easy as I thought. The biggest problems I faced were:

  1. Migrate the InstallScript to C# custom actions.
  2. Complex upgrade definitions in InstallShield.
  3. Binaries were automatically added to the InstallShield package, we wanted to switch to manual when using WiX, for better control. Later we reverted to automatic harvest using heat.
  4. Rewrite the user interface. We had a very customized user interface in InstallShield and the conversion to WiX UI proved to be a real pain.

Today, I would do the following:

  1. Migrate...
  2. Use simple upgrade in WiX. Block downgrades, allow automatic upgrades.
  3. Use heat harvesting with project references.
  4. Use the standard user interface provided by WiXUIExtension.

But after all the migration proved to be beneficial to my project.