Another new MSI authoring tool based on WiX

"War Setup" is a new Windows Installer authoring tool which uses the Windows Installer XML (WiX) toolkit as compiler to generate .msi files. War Setup supports WiX fragmants and is licensed under the Common Public License 1.0, so it's free and the source code is included.

Like I mentioned yesterday in my blog post about Indigo Rose's "Setup Factory for Windows Installer" it seems like WiX is becoming a popular foundation for MSI authoring tools.

It's also interesting that more companies and products are again entering the Windows Installer market. During the past years there was a consolidation trend with company acquisitions (Macrovision bought InstallShield and ZeroG, Altiris bought Wise and got bought by Symantec, ScriptLogic bought MaSaI Solutions) and product lines being merged or discontinued (both InstallShield and Wise combined their classic scripting products with their MSI authoring tools, ActiveInstall/InstallAnywhere.NET and a few others disappeared).

War Setup web site

Published Fri, May 18 2007 9:31 by stefan
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Comments

# re: Another new MSI authoring tool based on WiX

One has to really wonder just how many companies/products that this tiny market can support.

If you do some googling, you'll see that it's generally accepted that InstallShield has annual revenues of around $35-$40 million dollars.  It's also out there that InstallShield has somewhere around 69,000 ISV customer.....  that's only about $500 each.

It's interesting, InstallShield is the big name product out there, but when I start comparing stats, they really aren't any bigger then the company that I currently work for.

I can only imagine the scraps that some of these other companies must be struggling to bring in.

Friday, May 18, 2007 11:29 PM by Anonymous

# re: Another new MSI authoring tool based on WiX

I believe that in many cases the primary goal is not to add to the number of tools, but to create a better tool. I know that some developers started to create their own msi authoring solution becaue they weren't happy with the qualitiy, usability or the price of InstallShield.

However I really wonder how serious someone is when posting:

"As a heads-up, I am writing a tool to generate MSI files, I worked on it consistently for about 3 months to get the functionality up to the point of being able to incorporate the majority of features we needed. I've been working for another 3 months on-and-off to fine tune the behavior and add customizations to the installations. [...] I didn't hear about WiX until afterwards and haven't used it, but it probably would have been wise to look at that first and then thought about building on its functionality."

Christopher Painter blogged about this already.

Saturday, May 19, 2007 3:01 AM by stefan

# re: Another new MSI authoring tool based on WiX

Hi,

I am a (freelance) consultant for an installation authoring tool vendor and from what I see this is a huge market. The company I do consulting for already has more than 25,000 customers for their non-MSI system and their plan is to provide a MSI authoring tool soon.  It's already code complete, but the native .exe market is still growing and growing.

At the moment their main market is non-MSI (about 40%-50% of all new customers switched back from a .msi tool to native (script) .exe). My job is to convert InstallShield, Wise and InstallAware back to script based .exe.  We (4 consultants) have to work 7 days a week, 16 hours a day to get our work done. I know that consulting is booked until January 2008. Amazing.

So it is a huge market, IMO.

Ed

Saturday, May 19, 2007 5:14 AM by Ed Gross

# re: Another new MSI authoring tool based on WiX

I think setup tools development and setup development are really two different markets with the former being a tiny fraction of the latter.  I guess that's why I prefer to just buy my tools and then get to solving customers problems.

If an ISV wants to set out to make a new tool to compete in the marketplace, I'm all for that.

I'm more interested in the setup developers who roll their own.  I've met several people that fit this bill... frankly motivation was entirely suspect.  They were people who thought very highly of themselves and when you asked detailed questions it was obvious that they didn't understand how InstallShield worked.  Instead they were just busily rolling their own and  blaming InstallShield for sucking.  In the end they made their life a whole lot more difficult.

Seriously, if you can't take the time to understand how a tool works, how are you going to write a new tool in 3 months that's actually of higher quality when the original tool has had over 10 years of thought put into it.

Saturday, May 19, 2007 12:56 PM by Christopher Painter