WPF .NET Core Installer on VS 2019

Question

I am looking to create an installer for a WPF application with .NET Core 3.0 (not a console application) in Visual Studio 2019.

Can you help me out with some suggestions for any third-party tools or any other way it can be done?

I have already looked into ClickOnce and Wix, but both don't provide any option to create an installer for the above.

I know there are 2 ways to publish a .NET Core application, but I need to create an installer after that and I cannot find anything that will help me achieve the objective.

Answer 1

The WiX Toolset could definitely be used to pack up a published .NET Core 3.0 application. It will take a bit of elbow grease as there isn't deep tool integration (as Jon Skeet correctly suggests)... yet.

Steps would be something like:

1. Publish .NET Core project
2. Reference all the files in published folder in 1 or more .wxs files
3. Build .wixproj of .wxs files after publish .NET Core project

I'm pretty confident this will work even though I've not used.NET Core 3.0 yet because we've done something very similar for a complex .NET Core 2.0 application at FireGiant .

Answer 2

For deploying a .NET Core application internally in your organization, you can create an msix package. I'm successfully using it as a Clickonce replacement.

You can check my post explaining how to create an msix package for a .NET Core project. You can even target Windows 7 SP1 and later.