New "tallow" tool included in latest WiX

Rob Mensching just posted version 2.0.1927.0 of the WiX toolkit on SourceForge. It includes a new tool named tallow that does all sorts of interesting things. More on its capabilities in a bit, first I wanted to mention that it looks like the distribution forgot to include a compiled version of tallow.exe.

Update: Rob has fixed the distribution problem and 2.0.1927.1 now includes the tallow.exe binary (Thanks Rob, that was fast). All of my faithful readers (thanks Mom) can ignore the following makefile hack.

If you want to play with the tallow tool, download the source distribution for WiX from sourceforge, add tallow to the all target in 'makefile' and run make.bat.

--snip from 'makefile'--

all: msggen schematochm dutil wixcab wix candle light lit dark tallow wcautil scaexec scasched

Here is the command line help from the tool.

Microsoft (R) Windows Installer Xml Tool version 2.0.1927.0
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 2003. All rights reserved.

 usage:  tallow.exe [-?] [-nologo] [-1] [-c assembly] [-s file]
                    [-d directory [-da?] [-dd filter] [-df filter]]

   -1       one resource per component
   -c       extracts the COM Interop registration from an assembly
   -d       walks a directory tree creating components for all the files
   -da?     adds one or more attributes to all files recursed
      c - checksum
      h - hidden
      p - compressed
      r - read only
      s - system
      v - vital
   -dd      provides a filter for directories recursed
   -df      provides a filter for files found in a directory
   -s       extracts the registry keys written by DllRegisterServer from file
   -r       processes a .rc file into a WiX UI fragment
   -nologo  skip printing tallow logo information
   -?       this help information

I look forward to playing with this tool, especially the -d feature. It looks like this will eliminate the need for my silly little script. It walks a directory tree and generates a <Fragment>. I'm going to have to go back and re-read this post of Rob's to understand better how Fragments are to be used though.

6 Comments

  • Thanks, Loren. I've fixed these issues and released 2.0.1927.1.

  • I just wanted to mention that your silly little script, while modified slightly, has been extremely useful. We have created a sort of template/injection based system for creating MSI's for all projects in our Cm environment. It's working wonderfully, except for services - haven't figured a nice way to do those yet, concidering the custom action for registration/installutil-ish stuff.

  • Ryan, Thanks for the kind words, I'm glad it helped.

  • I followed your post to generate a MSI file for web service, but when install, it always have an error message &quot;The installer was interrupted before WebSetup1 could be installed. You need to restart the installer to try again&quot;. What should I do to fix that. Thanks

  • Sadly v3 also doesn't include the tallow.exe binary

  • Great stuff, good to see that tallow has been added to the toolkit. It sure makes my life a little easier.

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