Install WiX 3.7 into Visual Studio 2013 update 4 or VS2015

Question

I have both VS 2013 Ultimate SP4 and VS 2015 Enterprise on my system. I installed WiX Extension 3.7 (because it's the one supported by Visual Studio Online). WiX templates don't show up in either product. I tried restarting VS, rebooting the computer, removing and re-installing WiX a couple times.

Other postings around the internet that talk about how do this always tell you how to copy the WiX bits from an older VS installation forward to the newer one. I have no older VS installed, and hope I don't have to put in VS-- to install WiX so I can copy forward.

How can I get the WiX 3.7 extension to work correctly with VS 2013 (or 2015 for that matter - either is fine with me)?

Answer 1

You can edit the wisproj file and make sure it imports the wix targets file from a location under your control (in source control for example), that way you have total control over which version of wix is used during the build, even on VSO.

To make that even easier, you can reference the following NuGet package, it puts the latest version of Wix and the targets file in the packages folder.

Install-Package WiX -Version 3.10.0.2103-pre1 -Pre

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