How to reference custom WiX extension project in WiX installer project?

Question

I have a WiX installer project and a DLL project with a custom WiX preprocessor extension in my project. The problem is that the WiX Visual Studio extension can reference WiX extensions only as DLLs, not as Visual Studio projects. Is there any good workaround to this limitation, so that I can integrate my custom extension project into the build process?

I have already tried to copy the output of the extension project to a sub directory of the WiX MSI project via Post-build event, but that causes major headaches because of file locking issues ... besides, this is a very hackish way of doing this. I can't believe that something that basic isn't supported in one of the most widely used installer toolkits!?

Answer 1

Under Project Properties » Tool Settings, you could add something like this:

-ext ..\ExtProject\bin\$(Configuration)\ExtProject.dll

It's still a little hackish about constructing the relative path, though.

You should still reference the project so that the build order is correct. (The VS team recommends this over Project Dependencies since it works in all build scenarios.)