Wix Setup to deploy nuget packages

Question

How to author nuget packages required for a .net application in a Wix Setup? At present, we have 100 projects, each using different sets of nuget packages. And, we are manually adding a component for each assembly required for the application. This is very cumbersome, because each time we update a nuget package, we must update the .wxs file too.

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

Answer 1

There's a way to do this, you can call the wix harvester (heat) on your project's target directory and it will include everything in there. That command can also take an XSLT filter which ignores certain files if needed. You can call this command as a pre-build event in your setup 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/