My Wix Journey - Day 7 @ 8:43pm EDT

WiX has a Visual Studio Plugin codename 'Votive'.  This project enables you to edit WiX scripts from within the Visual Studio IDE.  It's rather convenient to click "Build" from within Visual Studio.  The best part of Votive is that you don't need to author build scripts to get an .msi file from WiX.  Just build the project, and you are on your way.

That's the good part of Votive.  However, I'm finding that it's not really stable enough to use in day-to-day developement.  In the first several hours of use, I spent most of my time being the good open source citizen, reproducing bugs and filing associated bug reports with the WiX project.  I soon discovered that if I continued down this path, I'd probably spend more time doing Votive QA than I would installation development.  That same day, I dropped using the Visual Studio plugin.

I stil edit WiX scripts with Visual Studio - I even created a C# project that houses both my WiX scripts and my managed custom actions.  I can still get intellisense for the WiX schema.  I'm really only missing a 'build' button.  I think I'll sacrifice that little feature to maintain my sanity.

Please note that Votive is still considered an "Alpha" component of WiX.  It will certainly improve over time.  I'm using build 2.0.2912.0.  I would encourage you to evaluate the plugin yourself in the near future.