[WiX-users] Decompiling Visual Studio MSI

[Mike M. <cha...@ho...>]

I have a Setup Project in Visual Studio 2008 for a product we have created.  I would like to move it to WiX so that I can have more control over the installer package creation.

I tried using the Dark utility on it to decompile it into a WiX source file.  It fails by throwing an InvalidCastException when it reaches the Control table while trying to get the X column value (saying it's "Unable to cast object of type 'System.Int32' to type System.String'").

I looked through the source of Dark.exe and the only thing I could find is that the Control object stores the X property as a String, but I wonder if the ColumnDefinition for X is declared as (or dynamically inferred as) an Integer.  Then when it calls the X property's get method, it tries to get the value out of the Fields property using a string cast of the object rather than a Convert.ToInt32() call.  But I'm not totally sure...

Anyway, I tried this with a very small test application and setup project.  It also got the InvalidCastException at the same spot.  So it appears maybe all Visual Studio produced MSI installer are having this problem when trying to decompile them using Dark?

Any thoughts or ideas how I can migrate to WiX?  Thanks in advance.

Mike