Wix Setup for deploying nuget packages

Question

How to create the nuget packages needed for a .net application in Wix Setup? Currently we have 100 projects, each of which uses a different nuget package bundle. And we manually add a component for each assembly required by the application. This is very cumbersome, because every time we update the nuget package, we also need to update the .wxs file.

Is there a standard way to automate this process of including nuget packages in a wix setup? Or is there a workaround?

Answer 1

There is a way to do this, you can name the wix harvester (heat) in your target project directory, and it will include everything there. This command can also accept an XSLT filter, which ignores certain files if necessary. You can call this command as a pre-build event in your installation project or as a post-build in your actual project.

Here is a guide that shows the details: http://ahordijk.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/automatically-add-references-and-content-to-the-wix-installer/