It’s really not that bad. WiX is actually pretty decent, definitely not a “disaster”. It might look more frightening than InstallShield because you don’t get a nice UI that allows you to set up an installer with a few clicks, but I mean, we’re programmers here, surely editing textual configuration files is not an issue? It took me somethong like 30 minutes to replace our old InstallShield installer with WiX.
I gave it a shot for a day recently but found it way harder to use than InstallShield or NSIS. Part of it was probably the broken documentation where half the links just ended in nirvana. But I gave up when I learned you really have to add each single file one-by-one and the documentation even defended this as a feature.
You can use this Wix tool or command called Heat, which will automate the adding (and creating GUIDs) for a bunch of files. Really it's the underlying MSI target that's so painful, especially when you get into versioning. The OS wants to have detailed information on every file that is part of your installation. I think this is primarily for uninstallation purposes, but also for upgrades and who know what else. If I could get away with it, I'd just use NullSoft. It's like writing assembly, but it's so much simpler.
With Wix/MSI, there were certain executables that I could never get it to run as part of the install process. The XML would look the same as other execute commands that worked, but I could never figure out why they didn't run.
This can "kinda" be worked around with "heat.exe" (don't get me started on naming of tools in the toolchain), but even then you'll need to explicitly specify half a dozen command-line arguments (-ag -dr -cg -srd -scom -sreg -svb6 -sfrag) to make the thing work.
WiX is a thin wrapper around MSI (which sucks beyond belief) and as such it suffers full blast from all the "design" decisions of the latter, not even trying to remedy the situation.
I really could pour out a full-blown rant on MSI in general and WiX in particular, but that would be wildly offtopic and of no interest to fellow HNers.
If you think MSI is bad, and I'll have to take your word for it, what MS had prior to it was probably worse. Writing installers for Windows using MS tools has always been a nightmare.
He's not wrong: WiX is a horrorshow. It's unintuitive, difficult to read and parse, and is saddled with much of the cruft of years of Windows; when you compare it (or NSIS, or InstallShield) to building an .app (or even a .pkg) under OS X, it fares very poorly.
Wait, weren't you complaining about all the "wizard clickety clicky" things in another thread?
If you hate wizards, and you hate "obscure incantations", which I'm assuming means code, then what do you like? Do you program in natural language with voice recognition?
By "obscure incantations" I mean having _three_ different syntaxes for string interpolation/variable substitution, providing _six_ command line arguments for the tool so that it does the one reasonable thing, having illogical rules in comparison operators, having to use a frickin' _bootstrapper_ to install prerequisites and not being able to chain MSIs, not being able to have a single installer for x86 and x64, not having a _simple_ way to define logic for "Back" button, yet having to write heavily nested XML to do simplest thing.
It's true that msi is different from other installer builders, but it's for a reason. And if you have a concrete project you can build while following along with the wix tutorials and book, it's not difficult, it just takes some time.
Yeah, the "reason" being that Windows Installer was designed to support corporate deployment of applications to shared machines with install-on-demand and roaming profiles, and to support Windows 95 and up. This, and Microsoft's manic affection to backwards compatibility plus "architecture astronautery" (on-demand installs of COM objects, anyone) makes MSI a disaster.
The fault of WiX is that it's too thin of a wrapper.
WiX (and MSI, for that matter) is a disaster.