First and foremost, I owe this post to Chris
Painter(@chrpai). He, on his own time,
walked me through the steps on how to get this dynamic versioning setup in TFS
and WiX. He saved me tons of time and I
really appreciate his generosity.
As a professional software developer I believe that having a
continuous integration setup is par for the course. I used to live in a
world where I would come into work on a Monday morning and find "the
build" broken. Mind you this was right before someone wanted to demo
the software. I have vowed that I will
not work without the CI safety net.
Today I needed to get my latest application installer
versioned. I want it to version each
time I check in and my CI build runs. I
want it to be as simple as possible. In
particular I am not yet ready to go the custom activity route. I spent a considerable amount of time on
Stack Overflow and the WiX forums looking for an answer, but with no
avail. Without further ado here is the
solution
1. From TFS open your build process template
in the xaml designer. You can find the
path hyperlinked from the Build Process page
2. While you are here go ahead and setup the
format of your versioning. You can do
that like this.
You can
choose your own versioning method, but let me explain this one. First the _ after $(BuildDefinitionName) is
important because we are going to use it to parse later. Everything after the _ will be the
version. You can see that mine is 3.0.YearDayOfYear.Rev. This will give me a version like this 3.0.13302.1 if the build is the first
build on Oct 29th, 2013.
3. Back to the xaml workflow. Navigate to the
“Run MSBuild for Project” step in the tree.
It is pretty deep in the hierarchy.
See the picture below.
4. Open the Properties of this build step and
modify the CommandLineArguments property to something like this. Notice I am
splitting on that _ I talked about earlier.
String.Format("/p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true {0}
/p:MSIProductVersion={1}", MSBuildArguments,
BuildDetail.BuildNumber.Split(New Char() {"_"c}).Last())
5. Save your workflow template and check it
into TFS under the BuildProcessTemplates folder.
6. Make sure your build definition references
the modified build workflow you just checked in and save your build definition.
7. Queue your build and install your
product. You should now have a
dynamically generated version number for your product that you can trace back
to the date and version of source code you build.
This solves a small part of the whole equation of installer
creation. It’s a huge topic with a lot
of available customization. Chris Painter
helped me get this far and has also showed me a great tool he created at https://iswix.codeplex.com/, which opens up a great number of possibilities
without having to know all the low level details of WiX itself.
