Cleaning a VS2010 WiX Installer project

Question

I have a VS2010 solution with a WiX 3.5 (beta) Votive project, (as well as all the projects for the program that I am installing). When I clean the VS solution all of the program projects get properly cleaned, but the WiX project does not - the wixobj, wixpdb and msi files are not deleted.

So my questions are:

Is what I am seeing expected behavior?

If so what can I do so that these files are deleted when I clean the solution?

Answer 1

To correct this behaivor, I think you should modify directly wixproj file. Open this file look at Target Name = "Clean" and change this to:

<Target Name = "Clean">
     <RemoveDir Directories="bin\$(Configuration)" />
     <RemoveDir Directories="obj\$(Configuration)" />
</Target>

Answer 2

I think that this behavior is not correct. But you can find the same behavior on WiX 3.0 RTM too.

I have all my product build automated, and I have faced this issue with the following (obvious) steps:

• Cleaning the WiX - Visual Studio project.
• Deleting all the contents on Bin/(Debug or Release) folder.

Answer 3

Following works in one line also

<Target Name="CleanMe" AfterTargets="Clean">
<RemoveDir Directories="$(OUTDIR)"/>
</Target>