WIX Toolset integrated into VS 2012 beginner problems
My company recently forced us to use Wix Toolset (v.4.0.12), because we upgraded to Visual Studio 2012 which unfortunately no longer contains installer projects.
My problems are the following. I have a big solution with many projects which all in all result in an exe file, and several dlls.
I then create a Wix setup project in the solution, and add a reference to the project that produces the exe file. In the properties of that project reference I set Harvest: true and Project Output Groups: Binaries.
I would expect a build of my WiX project to harvest the dependencies from the referenced project, so that I do not need to manually add the references, as that would give me more maintenance.
Moreover, if I run heat.exe on the referenced project file, I only get the exe output of the file, and not the dlls which the project depends on.
I assume that the above is quite standard, and wix tools should be able to gather that information for me. And I really wonder why after an extensive search on the net, cannot find anyone with similar issues.
If anyone knows why the above, please try to send me a basic tutorial of how to do stuff with WiX. It seems impossible for me find an appropriate one.
Answer
WiX v3.6 and later support VS2012. WiX v4.0 is barely even started and not recommended for use at this time. Lots of breaking changes coming in v4.0 so stick with the v3.x line for now.
The auto-harvesting feature in Votive is not fully functional. That is why it is disabled by default. Found many project types were breaking it. As you found, the harvesting does not walk through multiple project references. All things that need more work before they work properly.
In the meantime, you can list the File elements in Component elements.