Summary: In essence, the below states: 1) Disable the custom action to run the SQL Server setup.exe in your current MSI. 2) Create a basic WiX Burn Bundle to kick off the SQL Server setup.exe first, and then kick off your Visual Studio Installer Project-generated MSI afterwards. Or better yet, make the whole MSI in … Read more
The Visual Studio Build tools are a different download than the IDE. They appear to be a pretty small subset, and they’re called Build Tools for Visual Studio 2019 (download). You can use the GUI to do the installation, or you can script the installation of msbuild: vs_buildtools.exe –add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.MSBuildTools –quiet Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.MSBuildTools is a “wrapper” … Read more
WiX Resources: A couple of links first: WiX quick start resources. Hello WiX C# Custom Actions. “Hello WiX” (transparent aluminum please) I think what you need is the “Hello World” of WiX from CodeProject. This is quite old now, but still good at showing you the very basics of getting a working MSI compiled. UPDATE: … Read more
The Ancients: If the below is TL;DR (too long, didn’t read), please skim these two links: Troubleshooting Setup and Deployment Projects Why use Windows Installer XML (WiX) over VDPROJ? UPDATE: September 2018 – Since this “answer” was recently downvoted, let me try to add some more links to see if the intent of the answer … Read more