AnkhSVN and the WiX Toolkit

February 05, 2006

Programming

approximately 1 minutes to read

Recently, I tried AnkhSVN again - and it worked. For some time, the builds had problems, but the latest build works fine again. Read on to see what AnkhSVN is. Another thing that is working again: Niven’s MSI based installer - again, read on for more details.

AnkhSVN

AnkhSVN is a Visual Studio add-in that allows you to use SVN directly from within the Visual Studio. Click on the screenshot below to see how it integrates into the IDE.

With AnkhSVN, you don’t have to switch back and forth to the explorer when working on a SVN repository except for larger tasks like branching. But for everyday work, it safes you a lot of time and really works out of the box. Go and get it ;) !

WiX

WiX is Microsoft’s OpenSource toolkit for creating Microsoft Installer installations. Basically, you have a bunch of XML files which contain the UI, your product information and the source files, compile it and finally link it into a distributable MSI file. WiX works great, Niven’s original installer was based on it but not updated for some time. Today, I took a look at the new features and fixed the installer so it’s working again:

When I get a bit deeper into customizing the UI (at the moment, I can’t figure out the right resolutions for the various pictures which leads to ugly artifacts) I’ll post about it.