Over the past couple weeks I have been working with WiX in an attempt to convert all of our Wise built setups. Although tough at times, WiX has proven to be a very valuable toolset. If you, like my organization have already made the switch to VS.NET 2005, you know that there isn't a whole lot of support yet.
Some of you might be aware of an addin for VS.NET 2003 called Votive. This addin allows you to create WiX projects and has nice features such as intellisense. However, this application is not supported under VS.NET 2005.
If you want to have intellisense in your wxs file using VS.NET 2005, you can do a simple change to make this happen.
First, copy the wix.xsd file to the same directory location as your wxs file.
Next, open your wxs file and modify the wix node from:
<
Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2003/01/wi"/> to
<
Wix xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2003/01/wi" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://schemas.microsoft.com/wix/2003/01/wi WiX.xsd"> That's it, open your wxs file in VS.NET 2005 and intellisense will be enabled.
Also note that this is not specific to VS.NET 2005, you can do this in 2003 as well.
I hope this proves to be useful to someone.
- jake