Do all the components defined in a wix project get included in a final msi?

Question

When using Heat to auto generate it seems to create a whole bunch more components than what we want to actually ship.

For instance, Have a service that needs to be installed, so we want to do service registration stuff, and it is also a com component so we want to do com registration. This is all in an MSVC# project and including the project into the install project in wix automatically ran heat on it (I just meant to setup a dependency for build) and the output included hundreds of components.

If you want to allow for some dynamic portion - say change to the com registration - without including everything - like pdb files - how is this best managed?

When you include this heat file into your project, how would you specify which components make up which features and which get ignored?

Answer 1

You can specify the parameters along with which extension files you want and which to exclude.

Example

%1\Paraffin.exe -dir "..\..\..\..\Application" -dirref INSTALLLOCATION -custom App ..\..\AppFragment.wxs -guids -ext .vspscc -ext .cs -ext .resx -ext .csproj -ext .exclude -ext LocalAppSettings.config -ext .pdb -direXclude UITests -direXclude obj -direXclude Netrics -direXclude XSLT -multiple