WiX 3.0 with Visual Studio 2010 — no user interface libs?

Question

I've used Wix before to build installers, and it's great!

I recently re-imaged my machine, and only installed Visual Studio 2010, because I've updated all my projects to that version.

When I download and install WiX 3.0, it complains that Votive will not be installed because I don't have visual studio 2005 or 2008 "or later" installed. That's OK, I don't use Votive anyway (and I don't quite understand what VS 2008 has to do with that, but whatever...)

When I try to link my Wix installer using light.exe, I get a link error, because it can't find the UI wixlibs. Searching various locations on my drive (common files, Wix install dir, etc), I cannot find any wixlib files.

Is the problem that I need to find a separate download for the WiX UI libraries? If so, where? I can't find any promising links on the Wix web site. Or is the problem that the UI libraries are somehow linked to the Votive installation? If so, how can I install them on a system that only has Visual Studio 2010?

Answer 1

The answer turns out to be that UI has moved away from wixlib files and into the WixUIExtension.dll extension. Thus, when calling light to link, I can pass -ext WixUIExtension, and all is good. This solves my problem with "Unresolved reference to symbol 'WixUI:WixUI_Minimal' in section Product"

The exact steps are: Project Properties -> Tool Settings -> Linker -> add "-ext WixUIExtension"

Answer 2

Alternatively, if you created a WiX Setup Project, right-click on it and add a reference to WixUIExtension.dll, which is found in C:\Program Files (x86)\WiX Toolset [version]\bin\.